Stress

Stress is defined as the nonspecific response of the body to any demand upon it; it can be a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances. I am sure that most people have experience a state of stress in their lives, for example, stressing about school such an exam, their body image, social standing, economy, their future, and the list goes on. When we experience a situation of stress its because he develop a sense of fear that we do bad for example in school, that our future get another path or direction as how we planned it.

The signs and symptoms of stress can be seen not only in a physical way, but also emotional, behavioral, and cognitive. Few examples of them could possible be: memory problems, constant worrying, moodiness, depression or general unhappiness, nausea, diarrhea, nervous habits, procrastinating or neglecting responsibilities. All this symptoms can be influenced by other psychological problems or even medical problems. Also some symptoms can be more severe than others, depending on the situation and how each body reacts to it.

It is normal to feel stress about something that worries you, but when it starts to become more frequent that the symptoms are increasing, you develop new symptoms, your life is not as how it used to be before, then you should consider seeing a doctor and seeking medical attention. Also, its good to learn how to manage your own stress situations, for example avoiding unnecessary stress, don’t panic or alter about a situation instead try to be more assertive and deal with problems head on, learn how to adapt to the stressor, and accept the things that you can’t change. If you are one of those people that overthink every situations and stresses about everything, try these stress management, and think positively about whatever you are going through. It might be difficult to overcome the problem but for every negative situation there is a positive outcome you just need to keep fighting and never give up.

            This animation video shows some stress management strategies.

Using Placebos to Relieve Pain

Placebo is considered a drug or other procedure with no pharmacological effects, used to relieve pain in the body. What it means by pharmacological effects is that it does not contain an active substance meant to affect health. It is considered anything that seems to be a “real” medical treatment but isn’t. They can be administered as a pill, shot, or some other type of fake treatment.

Most effects of placebos are to relieve pain, in which patients experience a decrease in such case. Medical scans of the brain and the spinal cord have shown a decreased response to pain as well. The placebo effect has focused on the relationship of mind and body how they related to each other and what similar or different characteristics they have in relationship. For example, one of the common theories is that this placebo effect is due to a person’s expectation. This means that if a person expects a pill to do something, it is possible that the body’s own chemistry with the help of his mind, it can cause effect similar to what a medication might have caused.

Just like the placebo effect can have positive effects on a patient, it can as well have negative effects. Some side effects that they might experience may be headaches, nausea, or drowsiness. A problem with the placebo effect is that it can be difficult to distinguish from the actual effects of a real drug during a study. There are studies that show that there are actual physical changes that occur with the placebo effect. Like an example with asthma patients, it shows less constriction of the bronchial tubes in patients for whom a placebo drug works. Other studies have documented increase in the body’s production of endorphins, one of the body’s natural pain relievers.

This means is that a placebo will be more likely to be effective if you maintain a positive mind that this pill will have a positive outcome when you use it. This video gives a general overview on how a placebo works, and why is it effective, it provides a few examples to show its effect. It also explains how in the past placebo effect wasn’t used as how it is used now by saying that now the placebo is being misused by patients when they experience pain.

Korsakoff's Syndrome

Now a days there are many possibilities someone can damage their brain, and not just physically, but also by substances we consume, if they are born with a brain deformity, illness. Korsakoff’s syndrome is a brain damage that is caused by a prolonged thiamine deficiency. This is associated with heavy alcohol consumption over a long period of time, which happens mostly to men between the ages of 45 and 65. This doesn’t mean that women can’t be affected; they are also exposed to this type of syndrome since they appear to be more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol at a slightly younger age than men.

The Korsakoff’s syndrome is caused by a lack of thiamine (vitamin B1); this affects the brain and nervous system. It affects mostly heavy drinkers with poor eating habits in which the diet does not contain essential vitamins. This system is likely to develop gradually, in which the damage might occur in important small areas deep within the brain, such as the dorsomedial thalamus, the main source of input to the prefrontal cortex, resulting in severe short-term memory loss. Some of the symptoms associated that a person might experience are, difficulty in acquiring new information or learning new skills, change in personality (person may show apathy), lack of insight into the condition, and confabulation. Confabulation is where a person invents events to fill the gaps in memory. Like for example, a person who has been in hospital for several weeks may talk convincingly about having just visited their aunt earlier that day.

Just like most diseases where a person becomes addicted to a drug, in this case alcohol, one of the treatments used to help them could be to adopt a healthy diet with vitamin supplements to start producing again the thiamine, at the same time abstain from alcohol. Recovery and improvements usually occur within a period of up to two years. The support from family and friends is also helpful, giving them advise and motivation to stop this addiction for their own benefit.

People might think that this just happens to heavy drinkers that consume alcohol every day, but if you are one of those people that consume alcohol at least once or twice a week you might want to stop and think for a second what you are doing to your own body. Not only you have a probability of becoming a heavy drinker in the future and possible getting Korsakoff’s syndrome, but you might also experience less damaging to your body such as liver problems, as well as social problems with the people that surround you.

This video is mute, but it explains through a series of slides how the Korsafoff’s syndrome affects the brain.

Cutting the Corpus Callosum

Most of cutting made to the corpus callosum are because damage to it might now be allowing the patients to match the concepts they see in one eye with the concepts in the other half of the brain. This implication might cause a trouble coordinating their hands preventing them from matching sensations on one hand with movement on the other because the information doesn’t get to where its needed.

Cuttings to the corpus callosum might also be to treat severe epilepsy, which is a condition characterized by repeated episodes of excessive synchronized neural activity which results from a mutation in a gene controlling the HABA receptor, from trauma or infection in the brain, brain tumors, or exposure to toxic substances.

The advantages and good benefits of cutting the corpus callosum is that when a person experiences seizure symptoms, the brain will have much more difficulty sending messages between the hemispheres, this means that the seizure will only occur in one side of the brain and it will be less severe.

Most of the time this is a well-developed surgery with little implications. It is still possible to experience risks such as bleeding, swelling, or an infection during the surgery. Other possible compilations might include mutism (which is the lack of speech), weakness of an extremity, or lack of bladder control.  Other rare risk children might experience is the change in behavior.

People that have undergone surgery to the corpus callosum are referred to as split-brain people; they still maintain their intellect, motivation, and walk without difficulty. An example of what a person with a split-brain might experience is if he or she is touching a mysterious object with only the left hand, while also receiving no visual cues in the right visual field, the patient cannot say out loud the name of that which the right side of the brain is touching. This is because (1) each cerebral hemisphere of the primary somatosensory cortex only contains a tactile representation of the opposite (contralateral) side of the body; (2) the speech-control center is on the left side of the brain; (3) the communication between the two sides of the brain is inhibited.  

This video shows at first how the brain functions when you cut the nerves that connect both hemispheres, and they also show behavioral experiments with an adult that went through this surgery, how the brain reacts with this condition.

Reducing the Harm from a Stroke

Stroke is in the top five leading causes of death in the United States killing thousands of people, especially more common in older people. It is a common brain damage that may be causes by different factors such as a blood clotting or other obstruction in an artery, which is called ischemia. Or also, it can be causes by rupturing an artery, called hemorrhage. Throughout the years, medicinal treatments have been increasing and getting better, and cures for major diseases have been found. This has been done throughout many trial and experimental procedures.

One immediate treatment physicians can perform on patients with ischemia, is to give them a drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) which breaks up blood clots and prevents the obstruction of blood flow in the arteries, within 3 hours of getting a stroke. This can be very helpful for the patient because it can get rid of all the blood clots cause by the stroke, but at the same time is such a risky treatment in a way that doctors won’t be sure if to give this drug to the patients unless they perform an MRI to determine if it’s a ischemia or hemorrhage stroke.

My question is, would you let one of your relatives receive this drug if physicians are not one hundred percent sure if it will work effectively or not, if they are not putting the patients life on risk? Performing an MRI on a patient that has had a stroke it’s a lengthy procedure, and in order for the tPA and other treatments to be more effectively they have to be within a short period of time such as also cooling the brain to prevent a brain damage right after a stroke, or exposure to cannabinoids which minimizes also the damage cause by strokes.

Even though hemorrhage is a less common type of stroke, it is very fatal and giving the patient tPA, the risk of making the hemorrhage worse is small compared to the hope of alleviating ischemia. This is basically like tossing a coin if an MRI is not performed in order to figure out if the patient had an ischemia or hemorrhage. If you give the medication to patient with ischemia, the chances of alleviating them will be higher than if it had a hemorrhage. What would you let the physician of your relative with a stroke do in such a case like that?

This video shows some benefits and risks of the drug tissue plasminogen activator. 

Alcohol and Alcoholism

Now-a-days people in our society, especially younger generations, adolescence from high school and college think that drinking alcohol is nothing more than a pleasant way to relax. What they don’t know is that people with alcohol use disorders to excess, endangering both themselves and others. As mentioned by the author, alcohol is the most common of the abused drugs and the research on it is extensive, that’s why is treated separately from the other drugs.

Most adolescence think that consuming alcohol its better way of having fun than performing a sport or exercise activity, which might be somewhat true, if it is consumed with moderation not in excess and not consumed daily. This is because alcohol will bring health implication in the short and long-term if over consumed.

If alcohol is used in large amounts, it will not only cause health problems to you, such as the destruction of neuron cells, it can block activity at the glutamate receptors, and it can also increase the stimulation at dopamine receptors in the nucleus accumbens. It might also cause problems if you have never consumed alcohol before, such as causing a car accident if you drive under the influence of alcohol, or your behavior might change from a passive to a more aggressive person. There are factors that will help to identify those who are at risk of alcoholism, for example identify the young men who are not yet problem drinkers and compare those whose fathers were alcoholics to those who have no close relative with an alcohol problem. Those whose family has a strong tendency toward alcoholism, researchers expect that many of the sons of alcoholics to be future alcoholics themselves.

If alcohol consumption can be prevented, especially during pregnancy, you will save yourself from many health implications not only for yourself but for the baby too, such as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS/FAE) which causes facial and heart deformities usually below average IQ or mental retardation.

The Blood-Brain Barrier

A big concern in medicine studies is finding a way of how the blood-brain barrier can be protected from malign viruses and diseases, and how special medication can be passed through that barrier to treat the disease, without the medication being rejected by the own barrier. The blood-brain barrier is essential because it works just as the immune system, it protects the blood and brain by identifying viruses, diseases, and harmful chemicals and getting rid of them. This is such an important part of our system because, would you imagine yourself without a blood-brain barrier? How would our body protect our brain from harmful chemicals and viruses?

            The blood-brain barrier is being protected by endothelial cells that form the walls of the capillaries. One of the top ten leading diseases in the United States, in this case Alzheimer’s disease, attacks the epithelial cells lining the brain’s blood vessels by shrinking them, and introducing harmful chemicals into the brain. This barrier carries the brain’s main fuel, which is glucose, as well as amino acids. It would be of great help for scientists to find a way of treating this disease through the blood-brain barrier, because not only the disease might be reduced or completely be cured, but it could also help them figure out ways of introducing medications to treat other problems, such as brain cancers.

            According to an article from Medical News Today, scientists have found a new method for efficiently transporting antibodies across the blood-brain barrier in preclinical mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease. This transfer of antibodies through the blood-brain barrier was associated with a marked improvement in amyloid reduction in the brain of the mouse model. Per-Ola Freskgard, the Preclinical Project Leader for this technology platform at Roche pRED, said that "if we are able to clinically validate the preclinical results observed with the Brain Shuttle technology, it could lead us to a way to test investigational drugs in a variety of brain disorders".

 

New method for efficiently transporting antibodies across the blood-brain barrier in preclinical mouse models of Alzheimer's disease

The Ethical Debate

In research, there has always been a debate if whether or not animals should be used for research experiments, mainly because they can be helpful for finding the cure for many diseases, but at the same time those animals are harmed and killed for this reason. But, have you ever thought about what would happen if animal research wouldn’t exist anymore? Would the cure for Cancer or HIV ever be found with the use of computer models or other substitutes for animals? It would be hard to come up with an answer if the closest things to humans are animals, especially mammals, and they are banned from being used in animal testing.

I consider myself as a “minimalists” person that tolerates certain kinds of animal research but wish to prohibit others depending on the probable value of the research, amount of distress to the animal, and the type of animal. Animals such as chimpanzee and orangutan should be banned from animal research because they are put through to much pain and discomfort and they contribute to a big part in our habitat since they are the closest animals related to humans. Other animals like rats should be used more for research experiments since there are more species and they can reproduce more rapidly than chimps.

The use of animals in research has been beneficial in treatment for diseases such as diabetes and polio described in the article by News Discovery. According to Stuart Zola of Emory University it is crucial to do animal research because “to not do animal testing would mean that we would not be able to bring treatments and interventions and cures in a timely way, and what that means is people would die.” What this means is that if animals testing is stopped, the rate of humans being sick, and infected with diseases such as polio, would increase tremendously. Not only animals are used for this kind of purpose but also for organ transplant, such as the case of a pig’s heart being transplanted to a human.

US Researchers Defend Animal Testing