Iris Bell MD PhD

Integrative Health For Natural Healing

Getting Well

Astaxanthin for Health?

Getting Well, Holistic Medicine Updates, Vitamins

Astaxanthin for health? What is this odd-sounding substance?  Astaxanthin is a powerful antioxidant (technically a type of carotenoid) found in seafood sources like krill. As with other carotenoids, astaxanthin is colorful and gives a reddish color to cooked shellfish (shrimp, crabs, lobsters) or salmon. Natural supplement manufacturers also use microalgae or yeast to synthesize astaxanthin. Relatively free of side effects, this antioxidant has been shown to have a wide range of health promoting effects.

For instance, if you are suffering from some eye-related visual problems, astaxanthin may protect the retina from light damage. In a clinical study, astaxanthin, together wtih other eye-relevant natural substances lutein and zeaxanthin, can improve visual acuity in people with age-related macular degeneration. As an antioxidant, this versatile supplement may also help lower blood pressure and improve insulin sensitivity, as well as improve exercise tolerance of muscles in the elderly. If you have inflammation in the body, especially in the intestines, astaxanthin may help reduce its effects by helping the leaky gut heal. One study indicated that it might even help prevent stomach ulcers.

Other research suggests that astaxanthin may prevent blood clot formation in stroke-prone animals with high blood pressure. On another front, astaxanthin can protect the liver from development of liver cancers and fatty liver conditions. Although many doctors worry about using antioxidants during chemotherapy (antioxidants might protect cancer cells from dying due to the chemotherapy effects), astaxanthin may actually not alter bone cancer cell survival in dogs. This type of finding is good news – it means that astaxanthin doesn’t save bone cancer cells from being killed by chemo.

An important area needing more medical advances for management is traumatic brain injury, a condition that occurs in combat soldiers exposed to nearby explosions, athletes in sports like football or boxing, or ordinary civilians involved in car accidents. Astaxanthin appeared to lessen swelling of the brain that is associated with traumatic brain injury in a mouse model for TBI.

Can anyone know for sure if taking astaxanthin will help their health conditions – no. This is the case with any drug, herb, nutraceutical, or surgery treatment. But you have to weigh and balance the risks and benefits. The risks seem to be minimal unless you are highly allergic to shellfish or seafood sources of astaxanthin — then be very careful and discuss this with your doctor before trying even one capsule of this antioxidant. You would have options of other types available to you, e.g., quercetin or resveratrol as examples. But if you tolerate shellfish, then bring it up with your doctor. Find a naturopath to help you decide if it makes sense for you.

As with most nutraceuticals, another common challenge is deciding what brand to buy. I usually start my research on that question on sites like Amazon.com. I read the reviews. I read about the manufacturer’s track record in producing safe products that meet whatever standards exist for active ingredients and contaminant testing. Here are some examples of brands of astaxanthin that I think are probably acceptable – Mercola, Jarrow, or NutriGold. Most of these supplement products contain 4 mg per capsule of astaxanthin. Do your own research, however, as things can change in a short period of time. The supplement industry is huge, but the situation is still buyer-beware. You never know if you are buying an item that even has the amount of active ingredient it claims on the label. Look for independent testing sites to see how your favorite brand compares with others before settling on a decision.

 

Remember – I am potentially an affiliate of companies whose products or services I discuss here. That means that I may receive a commission (financial compensation) for sales of items that you purchase from a third party. I have no direct role in making their products or delivering their services and cannot take responsibility for any customer service needs or adverse events that might occur if you decide to buy an item that I discuss.

Dietary Improvements In Alzheimer’s Disease?

Diet, Getting Well, Integrative Medicine

Here’s a copy of the public press release on a new study in animals that offers promise for an adjunctive dietary aid for treating Alzheimer’s disease. This is not a cure, I hasten to point out, but it helps you function at the best level you can at the point in the disease that the dementia has reached:

Healthy diet could slow or reverse early effects of Alzheimer’s disease

Patients in the early to moderate stages of Alzheimer’s Disease could have their cognitive impairment slowed or even reversed by switching to a healthier diet, according to researchers at Temple University.

In a previous study [http://www.temple.edu/newsroom/2009_2010/12/stories/alzheimers.htm], researchers led by Domenico Praticò, an associate professor of pharmacology in Temple’s School of Medicine, demonstrated that a diet rich in methionine could increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease. Methionine is an amino acid typically found in red meats, fish, beans, eggs, garlic, lentils, onions, yogurt and seeds.

“The question we asked now as a follow-up is if, for whatever reason, you had made bad choices in your diet, is there a chance you can slow down or even reverse the disease or is it too late — that there is nothing you could do,” said Praticò.

As in the previous study, the researchers fed one group of mice a diet high in methionine and another group a regular, healthy diet. After three months, they split the group receiving the methionine-rich diet into two, with one group continuing the amino-heavy diet while the second switched to the healthy diet for an additional two months.

“At the end of the study, when we looked at these mice, what we found — very surprisingly — was that switching to a more healthy diet reversed the cognitive impairment that had built up over the first three months of eating the methionine-rich diet,” said Praticò. “This improvement was associated with less amyloid plaques — another sign of the disease — in their brains.

Pratico said that the cognitive impairment that had been observed in the mice after three months on the methionine-rich diet was completely reversed after two months on the healthier diet, and they were now able to function normally.

“We believe this finding shows that, even if you suffer from the early effects of MCI or Alzheimer’s, switching to a healthier diet that is lower in methionine could be helpful in that memory capacity could be improved,” he said.

Pratico stressed that this was not a drug therapy for curing MCI or Alzheimer’s, but that it did demonstrate that a lifestyle change such as diet can improve some of the impairments that have already occurred in the brain.

“What it tells us is that the brain has this plasticity to reverse a lot of the bad things that have occurred; the ability to recoup a lot of things such as memory that were apparently lost, but obviously not totally lost,” he said.

Pratico also emphasized that the researchers believe that in addition to switching to a healthy diet, patients diagnosed with MCI or Alzheimer’s also need a regiment of physical as well as mental exercises.

“This combination won’t cure you, but we believe, as we saw in this study, that it will be able to slow down or even possibly reverse the effects on the cognitive impairment,” he said.

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The study, “Normalization of hyperhomocysteinemia improves cognitive deficits and ameliorates brain amyloidosis of a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease,” is being published in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (http://www.fasebj.org/). It was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Copies of this study are available to working journalists and may be obtained by contacting Preston M. Moretz in Temple’s Office of University Communications at pmoretz@temple.edu.

Holistic Healing: Organizing and Coordinating Your Treatment

Getting Well

When organizing and coordinating your treatment, it is important to address your chronic disease through multiple coordinated levels of intervention that together keep your whole system changing toward better health at multiple levels.

Trying combinations of treatments that mostly fall into the same level of options is less likely to produce optimal results. For example, adding more and more nutritional or botanical supplements (Biochemical level of options) but no other type of treatment from the other levels of options is only likely to become expensive without getting you unstuck and moving along toward systemic health.

An exception might be if your disease is due to nutritional deficiencies, and supplements are all you need to correct the deficiencies.

However, for the typically complex chronic diseases of modern life such as inflammatory conditions, autoimmunity, heart and blood vessel problems, cancer, arthritis, and multi-system conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia, a multi-system treatment program package is usually preferable to an overly narrow one that speaks to only one level of your overall system.

Coordinating Your Systems-Oriented Treatment Planning

Start with the spiritual level of prayer and/or intention, which is singular and focused. Your intention to heal sets in motion the new pattern of change that you will undertake. It provides the umbrella for the package of care. Then you select from the different levels of options below the spiritual to fill in the ways in which you will work to get yourself unstuck and moving in a healing direction as a whole system.

Constitutional Systemic and Subtle Energy Treatment Options

Select whichever one form of constitutional treatment (Chinese medicine/acupuncture or classical homeopathy or Ayurveda) appeals most to you, is accessible to you in terms of provider availability and costs, and has the best evidence of helping in your specific condition (see the Resources section at the end for brief definitions and links to additional books and information for disease-specific guidance).

Constitutional systems of care tend to have long historical roots for hundreds to thousands of years. Chinese medicine, which includes acupuncture, is from China, classical homeopathy from Germany (Europe), and Ayurveda from India.

All of these systems describe the person as an intact whole, an interconnected network, in which the goal of treatment is to restore balance of function between the body parts throughout the whole system and harmony with the larger environment around the person (the natural, social, and transcendent worlds). Using a constitutional treatment that addresses the core illness process within you as a whole is the most powerful way to stimulate deep healing throughout your being.

It is best not to start more than one constitutional option of treatment at a time, as these are the most powerful forms of systemic treatment for chronic disease. Each constitutional program has its own transitional processes in stimulating healing that proceed best without disruption by another such process, especially in the beginning.

Can you combine two or more types of constitutional care? The answer is a cautious yes, though the combination requires collaboration between your providers and added skills and awareness of how you respond to each treatment. As time passes, the beneficial changes from systemic treatment become ingrained in your dynamics and patterns, making it easier to put you back on course if something happens to set you back or off track again.

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