Let's start with a bit of melancholy. I do so love this piece (right click to open in new tab) by Ralph Vaughan Williams. My 10th grade band director, who died in his early sixties of a heart attack, loved RVW too. There's plenty of tragedy in an ordinary life to go around, even now.Last week when researching the lithium post I pulled another article from the Journal of Lipid Research that looked...
Sabtu, 31 Juli 2010
Kamis, 29 Juli 2010
In my last post on the link between low cholesterol and suicide, I made note of some general trends between low cholesterol, suicide (particularly violent suicide), accidents, and violence, and raised some questions about the safety of cholesterol-lowering drugs. I didn't find any researched link between statin therapy and suicide, though one study showed that a statin reduced the ability of a certain...
Selasa, 27 Juli 2010
Lithium is an interesting sort of mineral salt. It sits on the periodic table right above sodium, and can fool our kidneys into thinking they are the same molecule. Scientists first figured out lithium could help stabilize mood in the late 1800s (when it was also used to treat gout). And, turns out, El Paso, Texas has high levels of lithium in the water, but low rates of violence and mental hospital...
Minggu, 25 Juli 2010
So far we have linked zinc deficiency to anorexia, ADHD, and depression. Meaning that patients with these conditions have a tendency to have lower serum zinc levels than people without them, and in anorexia and depression, human studies (only preliminary in the case of depression) have shown that supplementation can be helpful. The data for anorexia is robust (1), and the recommended daily supplementation...
Sabtu, 24 Juli 2010
I'll get back to zinc tomorrow. But today I heard this piano solo on XM radio (right click to open in a new tab if you want to listen and read), and it got me to thinking.The song is Traumerei, by Schumann, one of the most famous piano solos ever written. The pianist in the youtube video is Horowitz, playing an encore to his last concert in Moscow, thus the emotional reaction of the audience and...
Jumat, 23 Juli 2010
Today I will review more specific and up-to-date information about the interplay between zinc and depressive disorders and inflammation. Let's summarize the human evidence thus far (1):1) Depressed patients in studies have a lower serum zinc level than normal controls. 2) The more depressed the patients are, the lower the zinc level. 3) Low zinc levels in pregnant women are associated with pre-...
Kamis, 22 Juli 2010
When one makes a study of evolutionary medicine-type issues (that is, all chronic Western disease mediated by inflammation and diet and lifestyle so far removed from the life our bodies were designed for), the same nutrients keep popping up again and again. Fish oil is a good example. Yes, for heaven's sakes. I'm taking my fish oil. Shut up about it already.When examining the small unexplored...
Selasa, 20 Juli 2010
When one looks in the books and on the internet about a "paleolithic-style" or "evolutionary-based" diet, one will likely be confused at the end of it. Some will focus on what Kurt Harris calls "paleo re-enactment" - meaning we should be hunting wild boar, digging up roots, and honey is okay. (When I first told a friend of mine, who happens to be...
Minggu, 18 Juli 2010
UCSF medical school is running an 8 year prospective cohort study following patients with heart disease. The goal of the study is to gain some perspective on how psychological states affect your heart. A number of papers have been published (free full text! Suweet!), and today I'm focusing on one called "Scared to Death? Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Cardiovascular Events in Patients with Stable...
Sabtu, 17 Juli 2010
Tartrazine, also known as Yellow #5, is a coal-tar derivative azo dye found in a lot of processed food, including Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Doritos, Mountain Dew, Peeps, and many soups, custards, mustards, baked goods, cotton candy, ice cream and tons and tons more. It's also in a million and one other products we may use on a daily basis - lotions, face soaps (including the one I used this morning),...
Kamis, 15 Juli 2010
Here's the title to a June 2009 article in the Harvard Mental Health Letter: "Diet and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder - Can some food additives or nutrients affect symptoms? The jury is still out."Hmmm. That sounds very noncommittal. Let's start instead with the 2007 Southampton Study. Published in the Lancet, Britain's premier medical journal, this was a well-designed nutritional study!...
Senin, 12 Juli 2010
I was deficient in vitamin D. Of course. I paid attention to the official word about sunshine - it's bad for you. Ultraviolet radiation chops up your skin cell DNA, and with enough scrambled DNA and a bit of bad luck, you will eventually get cancer. There are several major types of skin cancer, but melanoma is the scariest, also, sun gives you wrinkles and age spots and... so I've been putting on...
Jumat, 09 Juli 2010
The paleoblogosphere is humming with excitement the past few days over the glorious work done by raw food blogger Denise Minger in her personal examination of the China Study, a large data set of epidemiology studies used by researcher T. Colin Campbell to formulate his book The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted...
Selasa, 06 Juli 2010
The first thing you think of when the word "psychiatry" comes up is probably not autoimmune disease. But I see a lot of it, as autoimmune diseases (all kinds - lupus, MS, hypothyroidism, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, seasonal allergies etc.) bring with them their tough to treat anxieties and depressions. And of course, as a psychiatrist, I'll also...
Sabtu, 03 Juli 2010
Low serum cholesterol has been linked in numerous scientific papers to suicide, accidents, and violence (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)... there are a bunch more, but I'm a bit weary of linking! This is why I write a blog, and not a peer-reviewed journal. Anyway, no one knows to this day whether depression, violence, and suicidal risk have a metabolic byproduct of low cholesterol, or whether having low cholesterol...
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