Category: Diabetes
Anxiety makes your memory worse, and worrying about your memory can make your anxiety even worse.
When you’re thinking about brain fitness, it’s easy to get preoccupied with things like computer training programs and exotic dietary supplements. It’s just as important, and probably more important, to remember the basics of brain fitness.
What are the basics? I think they start with essential health care that will make sure your brain is in a health body. Maybe the single most important basic is to take care of your blood pressure. Besides being a risk factor for heart attack, high blood pressure is a risk for stroke. Studies have suggested that high blood pressure is a risk factor memory problems. You should know your blood pressure, and if it’s high, you should discuss it with your doctor. A number of effective treatments are available for high blood pressure. You can find out more about high blood pressure on the web site of the American Heart Association by clicking here.
One risk for memory problems that seems to be more and more common is the metabolic syndrome. The metabolic syndrome is a group of characteristics that includes abdominal obesity (fat around the waist), problems with blood lipids (the special substances in the blood that carry fats around the blood stream), insulin resistance (your body doesn’t take care of sugar very well), and increases in the substances in your blood that cause blood clots. People with the metabolic syndrome may be at higher risk for diabetes and heart attacks. The American Heart Association also has a good page on metabolic syndrome here. It may be possible to reduce the effects of the metabolic syndrome by maintaining a health weight, getting regular exercise, and following a healthy diet.
We know that the basics include a lot of things we’ve been hearing for years. What has become more clear over the past few years is that there are clear reasons for the links among obesity, low physical activity, and several diseases. One of the most intriguing links is the fact that all these conditions are associated with markers of inflammation in the blood. Inflammatory markers have complicated names like cytokines and interleukins. You don’t have to know all the specific names to know that high levels of these markers go along with memory problems. More and more, then, there’s a clear link between your basic health and your brain’s fitness.
When I have given talks about brain fitness, many people ask me about dietary supplements. A number of supplements are promoted for maintaining brain health, and some may actually have promise. It’s pretty hard for most people to sort out the research on dietary supplements. This is what I suggest to people who ask me about supplements:
First, I warn everyone that supplements aren’t as well researched as regular drugs. This may mean that some supplements work better than we know. It may also mean that they have side effects that we don’t know about, or that may interact with other supplements or regular prescription drugs. So if you intend to take any supplement, be aware of the risks.
Of all the supplements for brain fitness, one of the most promising is already recommended by the American Heart Association. Omega-3 fish oils have been shown to have benefits for the cardiovascular system. Although it may be possible to get enough fish oil from eating fish several times a week, many people can’t eat fish so regularly or are worried about how much mercury they might get from the fish. Fish oil are readily available as capsules. Depending on your condition, you may want to take from 1 to 4 grams of fish oil every day. You can read the AHA’s recommendations here.
As I mentioned, there is little information about any supplement and brain fitness. In one study, a small group of people with very mild cognitive problems appeared to benefit from fish oil supplements. More and more, it’s becoming apparent that there is a close link between cardiovascular risk factors and brain fitness. This means, I believe, that most of the things we can do to improve cardiovascular health are probably good for the brain. The same blood vessels that are critical to keep blood flowing to the heart and the rest of the body are present in the brain. In fact, the most metabolically active organ in the body is the brain. So anything you can do to improve vascular health is likely to help your brain.
A recent study provides a clue into the exercise-brain fitness relation. A paper reported in the December 2008 issue of the journal Neurology shows that high levels of blood glucose (the kind that can happen in people with diabetes) may directly affect the hippocampus. Since the hippocampus is a part of the brain that is essential for memory, this study helps us understand one way in which physical fitness can affect brain function. What’s the link? We know that physical fitness improves the body’s ability to regulate blood sugar levels, so being physically fit may decrease the damage that high blood sugar levels can cause to the hippocampus.
The story is a little more complicated, though (isn’t it always)? Blood sugar is regulated by a hormone called insulin. People who have type II diabetes (the kind that people usually get later in life) have a condition called insulin resistance. This means that the body makes enough, and sometimes too much, insulin. The problem is that the insulin doesn’t have a strong enough effect. This means that the body keeps making higher levels of insulin. Exposing the body to high levels of insulin can cause problems.
In the case of the brain, insulin is very important for its function. Insulin has to cross into the brain from the blood by way of a special mechanism called a transporter protein. When insulin levels are high all the time, the body decreases the number of these transporter proteins, and the brain may not get enough insulin. Some studies have shown that insulin is important in memory function, so a decrease in the number of these transporter proteins may be yet another way that high blood sugar levels can affect memory. While all of these studies are preliminary, they add to what we know about high blood sugar, insulin resistance, and mental functioning.
There are two effective ways of keeping your blood sugar under control: diet and exercise. Following the Mediterranean diet can help, because it emphasizes the kinds of food that will help keep your blood sugar stable. Exercise has been shown to help your body be more sensitive to the effects of insulin. When your body is more sensitive to insulin’s effects, blood sugar levels will be lower and more stable. We know that following the Mediterranean diet and regular exercise can help your memory – their link to blood sugar and blood sugar’s effects on the brain may be why.
Latest
- Brain Fitness and The Mind of a Monk
- Brain Fitness Tip: Training Without a Computer
I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. (more…)
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.