The Unhealthy Brain

What may be happening, as was reported in 2005 by a group of scientists in the Netherlands, is that the patterns of electricity flowing through these neurons after chemotherapy may not allow different cells in the brain to adequately talk to each other.  

In a critical study at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, researchers directly linked chemotherapy to brain cell death in humans and rodents. Biomedical geneticist Mark D. Noble, Ph.D., and his colleagues reported that three chemotherapy drugs commonly used to treat cancer (carmustine, cisplatin, and cytara-bine) may be more toxic to healthy brain cells than to the cancer cells they are meant to destroy. They cultured human brain cells after exposing them to the drugs and also looked at how multiple human cancer cell lines, such as uterine and breast, reacted to the compounds. They found that typical doses of these drugs killed 70 to 100 percent of the brain cells but just 40 to 80 percent of the cancer cells. 

The team also gave chemotherapy to mice, and then autopsied their brains. They discovered that the agents killed healthy cells in several areas of the mice s brains, and other healthy cells continued to die for at least six weeks after treatment. 

More recently, Noble s group focused on a common chemotherapy agent, 5-fiuorouracil, or 5-FU, to see if the single drug would cause 

A key piece of the chemo/brain connection not addressed by those findings from Noble s studies, however, was the relationship of chemotherapy effects on brain cells with impairments in cognition. A second study further connected the dots between chemotherapy and brain fog. Gordon Winocur, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Rot-man Research Institute in Ontario, Canada, and his colleagues at Trent University in Ontario, injected mice with a combination of the anti-cancer drugs methotrexate and 5-FU.3 

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The methodologies and research tools to examine the processes at work in the healthy and unhealthy brain are rapidly maturing. 

The central nervous system, and the brain in particular, is the prime candidate for both being the sensor and normally the major controller of the response to physiological and psychological stimuli. However, under pathological circumstances, such as the influence of sustained stressful, unhealthy psychosocial environments and different damaging lifestyles such as those observed in unhealthy societies, the brain is altered... 

Clearly an important part of understanding stress-related disorders is to better define the chemistry of psycho-neuro-immuno-endocrine response patterns over time, from the healthy and time-limited to unhealthy and sustained individual. There is growing evidence that a physiological communication exists between the brain and the immune system. Several studies have shown that the white blood cells of the immune... 

Little is known about the molecular mechanisms and complexity converting psychosocial stress into cellular dysfunction in the brain, endocrine, and immune systems. How ordinary and sustained maladapted psychosocial stressors, chronic stress, and an unhealthy lifestyle activate and exert an influence on the biochemistry of the neuro-endocrine-immune axes with implications for future health or disease, is an upcoming innovative research field due to the new and emerging fields of proteomics, metabonomics, and biochip technologies. 

With this background there is an obvious call for novel strategies to follow changes of complex molecular patterns of different stress-related diseases over days, weeks, months, and years as an effect of lifestyle and the psychosocial environment to reflect the effects of unhealthy environments. The molecular interactions between the brain and the immune system in health and disease are reflected in the circulatory system as the white blood cells, the lymphocytes, mimic ongoing activities in the brain. By using lymphocytes from patients with psychosomatic-psychiatric diseases we can find detailed information about protein-peptide translational modifications and transformation essential for the development of new approaches that can prevent and treat major psychiatric diseases. 

More recently, modifications in the process of making the basic form of the drug have produced cocaine crystals that spontaneously generate small chunks this product is called Crack—related to the sound the crystals make when heated. It can be smoked and, therefore, will deliver cocaine into the brain as fast as an intravenous injection, but without the inconvenient and potentially unhealthy process of using a needle. 

Here again, most people can intuit the general answer. Anxiety and other emotions (such as elation) that increase brain activation of the waking type, impede sleep. They do so by increasing the set-point for the aminergic systems, which mediate waking and inhibit sleep. Besides causing insomnia, which is unpleasant, these conditions also induce sleep deprivation or, at least, sleep curtailment. And we know, from our discussions in Chapter 5, that sleep deprivation may be positively unhealthy, not just dysfunctional. 

Although by now even fast-food addicts have the guilty sense that french fries and pizza aren t exactly good for our health, very few of us realize that these poor food choices are also disastrous for our mood. Too many refined carbs and unhealthy fats play havoc with our brain chemistry as well as our weight, working against our efforts to overcome depression no matter how much medication we take. 

But beyond what we re bom with come the choices we make and the world we re surrounded by. The poor quality of food available to most of us—vegetables and fmits grown in mineral-depleted soil animal products laced with hormones processed foods laden with refined sugars and saturated in unhealthy fats industrial, agricultural, and environmental toxins—threatens our mental as well as our physical health. Our brain is literally affected by the poisons that surround us, which promote inflammation, impede adrenal gland function, and burden our brain chemistry in a thousand different ways. 

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