The Anonymous Widower

Keeping Your Brain Healthy

Look at any list of symptoms for coeliac disease and you’ll find a lot of them are concerned with brain or mental problems.

• Mild Depression
• Feelings of Inadequacy
• Gait Ataxia/Apraxia
• Lightheadness and Fainting
• Migraine or Persistent Headaches
• Mood Swings
• Sleep Disturbance

I used to suffer from most of these except for sleep disturbance.

Once I went on a gluten-free diet all of these symptoms cleared up.  Now I know that I am a special case in that I’m a coeliac, but once the B12 levels were back up to normal, all of the symptoms disappeared.  Research at Oxford University has indicated that higher B12 levels may help brain health.

It would be interesting to repeat their experiments with coeliacs. When a hospital diagnoses a coeliac, they should immediately undergo the tests before starting a gluten-free diet.  And then they should be tested at intervals after starting the diet.  My body actually reacted quite quickly in that my dandruff cleared up after about two weeks.

Now I know several people who have MS.  One has sent me a link to an article about a new treatment for the disease called The Liberation Treatment. Here are the first couple of paragraphs.

Amid the centuries-old castles of the ancient city of Ferrara is a doctor who has come upon an entirely new idea about how to treat multiple sclerosis, one that may profoundly change the lives of patients.

Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a former vascular surgeon and professor at the University of Ferrara in northern Italy, began asking questions about the debilitating condition a decade ago, when his wife Elena, now 51, was diagnosed with MS.

He found that in some patients, the blood flow to the head was restricted and by improving this using standard surgical procedures, their health improved.  Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the article.

One of those patients was Buffalo resident Kevin Lipp. Lipp had MS for over a decade, and as part of the study, discovered he had five blocked veins in his neck. After undergoing the Liberation Treatment 10 months ago, he says he hasn’t had a single new MS attack.

Zamboni emphasizes that the Liberation Treatment does not make people in wheelchairs walk again. Rather, it seems to stop the development of further MS attacks, and in some cases, improves movement and decreases the debilitating fatigue that are the hallmarks of MS.

It may not cure MS, but it is all very interesting.

I tend to look on the body, as an engineer would look on a machine or a car.  Machines don’t work well if they don’t have all of the things they need like fuel, electric power, oil, water and all the other necessities.

Is the body any different to my car in that respect?

And now today, it has been reported that those who develop Alzheimer’s are less likely to get cancer.

This would appear to push things in another direction, as research at Nottingham University has shown that coeliacs are less likely to get breast cancer. Diagnosed coeliacs have on the whole healthy brains because they eat well, so this research might show the opposite.

We need to do a lot more research to find all of these links.

December 24, 2009 - Posted by AnonW | Health | Brain, Coeliac, Migraines, Oxford University, Research, Vitamin B12