The UltraMind Solution (56 page)

While inflammation is sometimes obvious, such as when an injured area becomes swollen, red, and warm to the touch, science is teaching us that inflammation can occur silently and insidiously, without any symptoms.

To understand how profound inflammation can be to brain health, I want to look at three conditions that may be caused by inflammation: autism, depression, and Alzheimer’s. If we understand how inflammation plays a role in these conditions, we will have an opportunity to treat all problems of brain function in a radically different way.

Most psychiatric and neurological problems, in some way, are just the brain on fire.

Often we think of bad moods, unusual behavior, hyperactivity, or trouble concentrating as evidence of some psychological problem, much like we once thought autism and schizophrenia were the result of poor mothering. But new scientific findings are shaking up our thinking.

The Role of Inflammation and the Example of Autism

The most startling and convincing story comes from the world of autism. As I have said before, autism is just an extreme example of what can go wrong with our brain. The same things happen in depression, Alzheimer’s, or almost any psychiatric or neurological problem.

As the nature of disease gets uncovered, the common underlying roots of all illnesses become apparent. Autism and Alzheimer’s are almost the same disease showing up at the opposite end of the age spectrum—the metabolism, biochemistry, and causes all map over one another.

Martha Herbert, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, has put together a remarkable story of autism, which is like a hologram through which we can see the systemic nature of most illness. Her landmark paper, “Autism: A brain disorder, or a disorder that affects the brain?”
²
will change forever our thinking about mental and brain illness.

Dr. Herbert looked very carefully at autistic children’s brains on MRI scans. She noticed their brains were bigger than children who did not have autism.
³
The question that remained was why.

That’s where Dr. Diana Vargas and her group from Johns Hopkins came in. They examined the brains on autopsy of eleven autistic children who
had died.
⁴
They also looked at the spinal fluid of living autistic children. By examining and comparing these factors, they proved that these children’s brains were swollen and inflamed, like a swollen ankle!

This brought up another question: why were their brains inflamed to begin with?

The short answer is allergens, toxins, infections, and nutritional deficiencies.

But where do problems like these come from and how do they affect the brain? Are they in the brain to begin with? Well, many times they may not be.

It has long been known that children with autism not only have misfiring and wiring of their brain, but that 95 percent of autistic children have gastrointestinal problems and swollen bellies. It has also been noted that autistic children have frequent infections and allergies, and have often had multiple courses of antibiotics. And according to the MIND Institute at the University of California at Davis, more than 70 percent of children on the autistic spectrum have altered immune function.
⁵

Most doctors assume these are annoying but secondary problems, meaning they have nothing to do with why autistic children’s brains are not working properly or why their brains are swollen and inflamed.

But according to Dr. Herbert, the opposite seems to be true. These gut, immune, and toxicity problems are integrally related to and often the cause of what happens in the brain. In fact, she suggests that autism is really a systemic metabolic disorder that changes brain function. The brain and body function as a whole system. And multiple chronic, insidious triggers can throw the brain into chaos.

As you will learn in chapter 9 when I discuss the gut, more than 60 percent of the immune system is in the digestive tract. When that key system in the body is thrown out of balance, your immune system is triggered and widespread systemic inflammation can often result.

We insult our digestive tract every day. We do everything to harm it and hardly anything to help it work as it was designed. We eat food low in fiber, high in sugar, and full of antibiotics, pesticides, and hormones; we drink alcohol and caffeine; we take antibiotics, acid-blocking medication, anti-inflammatory drugs, hormones, and steroids; we are under constant stress; and we are exposed to thousands of environmental toxins, all of which damage the gut.

These factors create widespread inflammation because our gut immune system reacts to all the foreign proteins in food and all the myriad of bugs and gets “angry” and inflamed.

So if inflammation starts in the belly (and so many autistic children have swollen bellies), then spreads to the brain, it can literally lead to a swollen brain. And the effects can be disastrous.

Imagine the extraordinary beauty and dance of the brain where everything is exquisitely regulated. The timing and coordination of nerve-cell firing and the amplitude (or volume) of the message has to be just right. Filters that modulate our sensory inputs must let in only the information we need. The activity of the brain must be exquisitely synchronized for us to be awake, alert, receptive, interactive, communicative, flexible, and happy.

But what if the signals start misfiring and the coordination and synchronization break down because of multiple metabolic disturbances such as ineffective enzymes or cell function due to insults from toxins, infections, allergens, or nutritional deficiencies?

This is the net effect of inflammation, whatever the original cause. It triggers a runaway cascade of damaging effects. All mental processing slows, neurotransmitters can’t do their job, cell membranes don’t function the way they were designed, cellular enzymes get hijacked or derailed, cells get sent into a death spiral called apoptosis and the delicate network of cellular connections and communications is interrupted and altered.

How does that show up? As autism or Alzheimer’s or depression. It depends on the unique genetic makeup and environment of each individual person. In the children discussed above, the result of this inflammation is autism. In you, it may be anything from a bad mood to dementia to hyperactivity and difficulty focusing.

Whatever the case, at the end of the day we are all suffering from swollen brains.

These problems may not show up on the radar of conventional testing, but they wreak havoc in your body and your brain. We see this havoc as altered behavior, mood, and memory. It is precisely in these metabolic disturbances that we need to look for answers.

Inflammation has enormous implications for treating autism and most “brain disorders.” Our broken brains may be due to
fixable
metabolic problems created by digestive imbalances, toxins, foods, allergens, and hidden infections, and worsened by nutritional deficiencies.

Scientists are now asking the question why? Why do we find more mercury in autistic children? What is the effect of mercury on the brain? Why do these children have altered immune function? Why do they have more viral infections? Why do we find measles virus in the intestinal lining of these children and in their spinal fluid? What is the effect of giving babies nine immunizations at one doctor’s visit, or twenty-seven by the time they
are two years old? How do these all trigger inflammation and how does this cause autism?

Questions like these force us to ask how biology, brain, and behavior connect.

There Is No Gene for Autism: Looking at All the Causes

Researchers have been searching for the one autism gene, or the one location in the brain that is damaged, that leads to autism. Looking for these kinds of answers implies that the changes that cause autism (or other “brain disorders”) are genetically hard-wired and therefore treatment is hopeless.

But these researchers are looking in the wrong place for the source of the problem.

These same metabolic and environmental problems hold true for the 1 in 6 children with some type of developmental problem, the 1 in 10 with ADHD, and the 1 in 150 with autism. Each of these may be problems related to underlying metabolic disorders, and
not
the result of genetically hard-wired diseases or damaged brains. It is all the same problem just showing up slightly differently in different kids.

Dr. Herbert suggests that many
different causes
can lead to the
same symptoms
, namely the lack of language and social connection and the rigidity and inflexibility of behavior seen in children with autism, as well as many “behavioral” problems in children such as those with ADHD. A few common pathways result in the same symptoms from a host of different insults. There may be many “autisms,” each caused by slightly different factors.

Rather than studying drugs that affect the brain to treat autism, the better path may be studying treatments that target inflammation, toxins, allergens, infections, or fixing biochemical train wrecks (like problems with methylation and sulfation), and gut problems.

Treating the gut, or giving B
₁₂
, B
₆
, and folate, omega-3 fats, vitamins A or D, or magnesium and zinc, or eliminating gluten and casein (the protein in dairy that so many are sensitive to) from the diet, or detoxifying mercury and lead from their little bodies may be the best way to get autistic children’s brain connections working again.

Quite a notion!
Treat the body, and heal the brain.

The experience of thousands of children, parents, scientists, and doctors who are part of a unique collaborative effort called DAN!, or Defeat Autism Now! (www.autism.com), confirms that this approach helps children recover—some slightly, some miraculously—from a disorder that was thought incurable.

In the treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders, we must look at the body. We need to look for the connections, patterns, and final common pathways that have enormous implications for so many “fixed” diseases. If recovery and improvement are documented in autism, what does that mean for Alzheimer’s, chronic depression, bipolar disease, psychosis, eating disorders, or violent sociopathic behavior?

These problems, it seems, are not hard-wired into the brain, as we believed, but the result of a few common systemic problems that completely mess up the fine dance and coordination of the brain—problems that can be fixed metabolically and systemically.