Pulse Beat

Prof Dr BM Hegde 08 November 2016

The Sweet Devil

I succeeded in getting rid of the devil called cholesterol after 40 years of struggle. Now, the real culprit has come to light that is the ‘white, pure and deadly’: sugar. A book by that title was written by a friend of mine in London—John Yudkin, a professor of nutrition at the London University, in the 1960s. See how the industry works. Yudkin was dismissed as a professor and even his degree was made useless! Now Yudkin is enjoying some sort of revival.

The man is in heaven; must be laughing from up there as the real culprits have been exposed—the fat lobby. Further studies are needed to clarify how sugars per se increase the vascular complications in the human system. While we know brown sugar (jaggery) is an antioxidant, white sugar becomes an oxidant and a poison! Is it in the sugar itself or in the process that converts the antioxidant into oxidant that does the trick would help solve this riddle?

Schizophrenia and Drug Abuse

The question of whether drug abuse increases the risk of developing schizophrenia and other mental illnesses has been a hotly debated topic for decades. New research from Denmark, that includes data from more than three million individuals, takes an in-depth look at the conundrum. This study showed very clearly that alcohol abuse and drug use for enjoyment can hasten the onset of schizophrenia.

I do not think that this study can be easily rejected or disputed. The sample size is very large. In my opinion schizophrenia, as a disease, has not been fully understood. With the acceptance of consciousness, the human mind can no longer be confined to the human brain. The man who originally confined the mind to the brain, and got his Nobel Prize for that, has himself admitted that in his experience the mind (mind-action) cannot be in the brain with its billions of cells and trillions of synapses.

Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon, in his paper in 1971 had admitted his mistake. With this in mind, we need to have a serious re-look at schizophrenia, the double personality disorder. The drug treatment that we adopt in the management of schizophrenia might not be the right one. Those patients need more compassion from society. They also need trained clinical psychologists to understand and set right the altered mind state.

Marijuana Receptor in the Brain

Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the main psychoactive component of marijuana that is responsible for the mind-altering effects of the drug; but the exact mechanisms by which it produces such effects have been unclear. Now, researchers have pieced together the clearest picture to date of how THC binds to a specific cannabinoid receptor in the brain to produce the ‘high’ associated with marijuana use. Since the opiate receptors have been discovered even outside the brain, logically, the cannabinoid receptors must be outside the brain.

With the background of marijuana being a powerful anti-cancer agent in serious anecdotal reports, the time has come for us to look into the possibility of such receptors in body organs as well. I hope and pray that, one day, marijuana becomes cheap and effective treatment for cancers.

Regular Exercise and Mental Alertness

More than 16 million people in the United States live with cognitive impairment. One shudders to think of the numbers in India if linear mathematics were to work in human affairs. The underlying cause of vascular cognitive impairment, in particular, is caused by problems with blood supply to the brain. Scientists may have found a solution to prevent memory decline in people with this condition, in the form of regular exercise.

It might not only be the vascular part of dementia that might be corrected or prevented by exercise. Regular walking, for example, has been shown to be associated with alertness in the elderly. The psychological high that one appreciates after a good morning walk, by itself, could postpone cognitive decline in ageing populations.

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