Gene Morphis ' View

Robert Parker had a hit with his song “Barefootin” in 1966. Who knew he was talking about brain health. Hypothesis 1 There is a hypothesis that we need to spend more time barefoot. Those holding the view that we should spend more time shoeless base it on the idea that our ancestors spent eons that way. By wearing shoes all the time, our brains are not getting important signals from those thousands of nerves on the soles of our feet. By going barefoot, we restore the flow of information into the brain, keep those nerve pathways active and so on. Hypothesis 2 There is an additional, related hypothesis in favor of us spending a lot more time barefoot-particularly outside. The leading proponent of this idea is Dr. James Oschman. Dr. Oschman has degrees in Biophysics and Biology from the University of Pittsburgh. According to him, planet earth gives off free electrons, which can transfer into our bodies if we don’t have an insulation layer in the form of shoes. And that those fr...

Regular consumers of chocolate are about 42% less likely to develop cardiovascular heart disease . A research team from The University of Manchester and other institutes set out to determine if there is a relationship between chocolate consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. (Chocolate is rich in flavonoid catechin. ) The researchers included Dr. Chun Shing Kwok, S. Matthijs Boekholdt, Marleen A. H. Lentjes and others from the Medical Schools at the University of Manchester, University of Aberdeen, University of Cambridge, the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam and other research institutes. They used data from the massive European Prospective Investigation into Cancer (EPIC) study. (You may recall that we’ve referred to other research reports stemming from EPIC). They isolated a qualifying group of 21,000 adults in the UK who have participated in the study for about 12 years. The data recorded for that group included frequency of consumption of chocolate (...

The approach that Kan Ding, MD, Takashi Tarumi, PhD, and team used to evaluate brain health in relation to breathing is unique and interesting. They used oxygen uptake as a measure of fitness. You’ve likely seen a tv commercial or video with a professional athlete or perhaps an Olympic hopeful running or biking with a mask and tube strapped to their face. That equipment is measuring “VO2Max” or the use of oxygen by someone exercising. Distance runners, cross country skiers and the like must consume and burn oxygen highly efficiently if they want to be competitive The University of Texas Southwest Medical Center recently opened its new Brain Institute. That’s where Doctors Ding, Tarumi and associates work. They recruited 91 participants diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. Generally, that means they were able to care for themselves but were noticing some memory difficulty. Participants in the study had VO2Max measured, had brain image scans, and various tests of cognition per...

Standing desks are the rage. Star coders demand a standing desk, along with a truckload of stock options, to change jobs. TV commercials show these lean, obviously high-achiever types using their stand-up desks. Can’t wait to get one? Think twice. A team at the University of Toronto School of Public Health did a study. Here’s the punch line: Prolonged standing at work doubles heart attack risk . Peter M. Smith, MD, PhD led the study of over 7,000 individuals. The research goal was to get real-world measurement of standing versus sitting in a business setting. They divided the individuals into four groups: mostly standing, mostly sitting, stand and walk, mix of positions like crouching and kneeling. Those who stood the most head a greater risk of heart disease. Importantly, most of the tests were done in a factory setting where workers had less opportunity to move, stretch or sit. Overall conclusion – move around some. If your job allows, sit when you get tired of standing....

Parents and Grandparents- Read This! The University of Southern California hosts a Brain and Creativity Institute. It just reported the results of a five-year study on the effect of learning to play a musical instrument on brain development of children. If you’ve reading our newsletters for a while, you won’t be surprised with the results. The young musicians, who practiced an average of seven hours per week, had accelerated brain development in the areas of the brain associated with speech, reading skills, sound perception and more. Remember the PR around Amy Chua’s book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that popularized the term “Tiger Mom”? Sounds (get it, sounds?) like she got the music education part right. Link to a research summary here . We’ve previously noted that learning to play a musical instrument at any age is a great brain builder and is one of the steps we can take to prevent dementia. We Promised In our last newsletter, we said we’ll revisit alco...

Alcohol and Brain Health-Part I A few weeks ago, we warned of the risks of alcohol consumption, based on a study by the Department of Psychology at Oxford University. Five hundred fifty people were tracked over thirty years, with detailed records of their health maintained.   Anya Topiwala, PhD and Charlotte L. Allen, PhD led the project. From the study: “…even those drinking moderately had three times the odds of right sided hippocampal atrophy” Also from that study: “Light-to-moderate drinking has been associated with a lower risk of dementia and a reduced incidence of myocardial infarction and stoke. Brain imaging studies, however, have thus far failed to provide a convincing neural correlate that could underpin any protective benefit.” Link to study here . Further, the definition they used to determine a moderate amount were different than the old U.S. four once glass of wine, 1.5-ounce cocktail or ten-ounce beer. In all cases they were smaller. A half-pint of beer...

We’ve found some simply delicious research reports. Chocolate Lovers- Take Heart! Denmark has created a large health study, with over 55,000 participants who have been tracked for over 13 years. Originally designed to identify cancer risk factors, it captured sufficiently rich and detailed information that it can be used to assess heart health benefits as well. Research teams from Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, and Aalborg University Hospital in Aalborg Denmark teamed up. Kim Overvad, PhD in Epidemiology at Aalborg University Hospital took the lead; Murray A. Mittleman, MD of Beth Israel and Elizabeth Mostofsky, ScD and a post-doc at Beth Israel also worked on it. The researchers were trying to determine if consumption of chocolate reduced the risk of atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation is commonly called “afib” here in the U.S. It’s likely you’ve seen advertisements for medications to treat it. Afib is associated with a higher risk of stroke, dementia, heart fai...

A good night’s sleep may help you manage fear and risks better. A study just posted in Journal of Neuroscience describes the importance of a good night’s sleep to controlling strong emotions, especially fear. Previous studies in this area attempted to discover what happens in the brain after a frightful experience.  These prior studies, for example, show how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) affects sleep. A team at the Rutgers University Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, led by Itamar Lerner, has taken a different approach. They wanted to see if there is a relationship between adequate sleep and prevention or management of the brain’s reaction to subsequent stressful events. Research Team Lerner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in sleep research. Along with fellow researchers Neha Sinha-also doing Postdoctoral research-in her case in brain imaging, Shira Lupkin and Alan Tsai, they used new technology that allows mobile tracking of sleep habits over a per...

Soda can make you stupid, or worse. Sometimes we find research reports on brain health that are sobering. There was a rather spooky one we just read. But we also discovered one that is positive. Here’s the tough medicine first.   Artificial Sweeteners May Be Bad For You   Here’s the punch line: “Daily diet soda drinkers three times more likely to develop stroke and dementia compared to those who don’t”. You might have seen that headline before. It drew a lot of publicity. Now, remember your statistics class: correlation doesn’t mean causation. Just because the years that skirt hemlines go up are also years that the stock market goes up doesn’t mean short skirts cause the stock prices to increase. It could be that other things diet soda drinkers do – or don’t do- is the reason they are more likely to have a stroke or get dementia.   Here’s  a link to a summary of the research  if you want to read more. The research was done by a team from Boston U...

If you do it right, puzzles and games might just save your brain. There are millions of players of strategy games, memory games, word games and puzzles. They want to know that working crosswords, solving sudoku, playing bridge, mahjong or chess will help preserve mental acuity. Some are counting on it. Cognitive Reserve Cognitive reserve is the term developed after researchers found instances of examination of the brains of individuals that showed signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, but, while alive, the individual had exhibited no signs of dementia.  We want to build cognitive reserve, and there is evidence that puzzles can do that. One key-and positive- study from 2011 found that solving crossword puzzles delayed onset of memory loss by 2.5 years, and may have had much longer beneficial impact. NIH Research The National Institute of Health and the National Institute of Nursing Research funded a study on brain-training and cognition. That study is related-ad...

Your brain has an Executive Function . Executive function is the scientific term for our ability to organize activity, learn from past experiences, make plans, solve problems and work puzzles. Some Science Among the areas in the brain involved in executive function are the medial frontal cortex and the lateral prefrontal cortex . Robert M.G. Reinhart PhD and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Boston University notes that those two areas control most of the executive function. He calls these areas “ the alarm bell of the brain ”. Reinhart is the Director of the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston University and, among other area of brain research, has been studying ways to employ electrical stimulation to improve performance in learning and self-control. “If you make an error, this brain area fires. If I tell you that you make an error, it also fires. If something surprises you, it fires,” says Reinhart. More Science Kimberly Luu, currently doing graduate s...

Tuesday, the CDC reported that being overweight or obese is associated with higher risk of 13 different cancers. They put it into perspective with two additional pieces of data: first, two-thirds of American adults are overweight , and second, in 2014, there were 630,000 diagnoses of those forms of cancer in the U.S. That is, there were 630,000 cases of the kinds of cancer associated with being overweight. Over a third of Americans are obese. Now, that’s not someone’s judgement call. That is a statistical finding, based on studies of body mass index (BMI). Here's the formula for BMI so that you can calculate it for yourself. You may want to convert your height and weight into meters; some of the formulas I’ve found use the metric system. Here's a converter for inches into meters. A friend of mine said he is writing a three-hundred-page book on diet. On one page it has “Eat Less”. The facing page has “Exercise More”, for all three hundred pages. There is no mystery...