How Can B Vitamins Protect You from Brain Shrinkage?

A rapidly shrinking brain is one of the signs that your wellness is at a raised risk for Alzheimer’s. However, if you take B vitamins, you can reduce this shrinkage by 90%. This is according to a new study, published May 20^th 2013 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that the wellbeing of those who took B vitamins was almost entirely protected from the brain shrinkage suffered by those who only received a placebo pill.

 

Alzheimer’s typically destroys areas of your brain that control how you learn, remember and organise your thoughts. However, the areas of the brain that were protected from damage were almost exactly the same as those covered by the “Alzheimer’s footprint”. ‘I’ve never seen results from brain scans showing this level of protection,’ says Paul Thompson, professor of neurology and head of the Imaging Genetics Centre at UCLA School of Medicine, California – which has the largest database of brain scans in the world. ‘We study the brain effects of all sorts of lifestyle changes — alcohol reduction, exercising more, learning to handle stress, weight loss — and a good result would be a 25% reduction in shrinkage.’

 

So why are B vitamins so effective at preventing brain shrinkage, and its associated memory problems? Professor Teodoro Bottiglieri Baylor, at the Institute of Metabolic Disease in Dallas, Texas, explains, ‘The link between brain deterioration — memory loss, cognitive deficits — and B vitamin deficiency is standard neurology textbook stuff. You get it with various disorders that prevent B vitamins functioning properly, such as severe alcoholism and pernicious anaemia.’

 

Aside from finding that the vitamins reduced shrinkage across the whole brain compared with the brains of the people taking a placebo pill, another study from the University of Oxford noted that B vitamins only benefited people who had a high homocysteine level. A healthy level is said to be between about seven and ten, but these people had a level of 13 or more. Lead researcher on the trial David Smith, professor emeritus of pharmacology at Oxford, commented, ‘It was a useful finding. It showed you’ll only benefit from the vitamins if your homocysteine level is high, but it also told us that when it rises above a healthy level it can damage brain cells.’

 

Yet, Dr Siobhain Quinn, a psychiatrist specialising in older mental patients at St Peter’s Hospital, in Chertsey, Surrey, noted, ‘Most GPs are not very familiar with homocysteine risks, and it’s not a standard test, although you can get it done privately. However, testing for B12 is quite common in the elderly and it is standard practice to give tablets or injections if it is too low. So that could be a way of getting treatment, but probably not in the high doses used in the Oxford trial.’

Categories: b vitamins, brain shrinkage, Research

I Never Knew That: Five Major Ways that Stress Impacts You

You know that stress is bad for your mental health; it causes you to lose sleep, to eat more, to become anxious and depressed, but that’s it – right? Unfortunately, stress does a whole lot more damage to your wellness, and below are just five examples.

1. Stress helps cancer to survive against anti-cancer drugs – According to a recent animal study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, an anti-cancer drug administered to mice was less effective at killing cancer cells when the animals were stressed. The Wake Forest University researchers found that the cancer cells were actually kept from dying because the mice produced adrenaline.


2. Stress shrinks your brain – Even if your wellbeing is in otherwise tip-top shape, Yale University found that stressful occasions, such as a divorce or losing your job, reduces the grey matter in regions of your brain tied to emotion and physiological functions, which shrinks it. The study findings, which were published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, are important because these changes in brain grey matter could lead to future psychiatric problems.


3. Stress ages your children prematurely – If your child is exposed to violence early on, the stress could lead to premature ageing of his or her cells. This is according to research in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, which found that, of the 236 children followed (who were born in England and Wales and were aged five and 10), those who were witnesses of violent acts or victims of violence, had shorter telomeres.


4. Stress may be passed on from generation to generation – University of Cambridge researchers found that certain markings to the genes of mouse germ cells (before they become eggs or sperm) still exist in the next generation, even though wellness experts previously though that these markings, which are influenced by outside factors like stress, are erased in the next generation.


5. Stress increases your chances of chronic diseases – While this may not be new information, it’s not just the stress, but how you react to it, that could have an impact on your health down the road. A new study from Pennsylvania State University researchers, published in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine, found that people who were more anxious about the stresses of everyday life were more likely to have chronic health conditions (such as heart problems or arthritis) 10 years later, compared with people who viewed things through a more relaxed lens.

Categories: brain shrinkage, cancer, premature ageing