Power Up Your Brain by Perlmutter David & Villoldo Alberto

Author:Perlmutter, David & Villoldo, Alberto [Villoldo, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2011-02-01T06:00:00+00:00

BDNF and Brain Protection

BDNF is important not only in neurogenesis and neuroplasticity but also in protecting delicate neurons from being damaged by a variety of insults, including trauma, transient reduction in blood supply, and, perhaps most important, environmental toxins. Indeed, in laboratory studies, rats and even primates with higher levels of BDNF are far more resistant to brain-damaging toxins than animals with low or normal levels.

One important neurotoxin often used in laboratory animal experiments, especially those designed to evaluate the protective effectiveness of BDNF, goes by the abbreviation MPTP (which stands for its chemical designation). This neurotoxin has the relatively unique ability to specifically damage a part of the brain in humans, as well as in several animals, that is associated with Parkinson’s disease. Therefore, MPTP is often used to measure the possible benefits of pharmaceutical preparations to defend the brain against neurotoxins. But, unlike many other investigations that are developed in laboratories, the MPTP street story is far more intriguing.

In the early 1980s, seven individuals ingested a street drug they thought was similar to heroin. Instead, due to an error in the illicit production of the heroin-like drug, the substance they took was contaminated with MPTP. Shortly thereafter, they were diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

While this was devastating to these people, it opened the door for researchers to develop a powerful experimental model for the disease as described by neurologist J. William Langston in his book, The Case of the Frozen Addicts: Working at the Edge of the Mysteries of the Human Brain (1997), which later became the subject of two NOVA productions by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Langston found that treating squirrel monkeys with MPTP caused almost immediate development of Parkinson’s, with damage to the animals’ brains occurring exactly in the same area as in humans with the disease. Subsequent experiments with other animals generated the same results. Langston and others ultimately concluded that MPTP destroyed neurons by destroying their specific source of energy production, the mitochondria. Thus, MPTP proved to be a mitochondrial toxin specific for the area of the brain associated with Parkinson’s.

Once it was discovered that MPTP selectively damaged mitochondrial function and produced Parkinson’s, researchers focused their efforts to learn how they could block the damaging effects of this neurotoxin and, presumably, by extension, reduce the damaging effects of pesticides in general. Various drugs were developed, including Deprenyl, that, at least in animals, held promise of providing some protection for mitochondrial function against toxins like MPTP.

While human trials showed only modest benefit, the most dramatic neuronal protection against MPTP was not found in some extrinsic laboratory-produced, patentable drug, but with BDNF, a substance already within our physiology, encoded in our own DNA, a gift not purveyed on a prescription pad but from nature.

Study after study has since confirmed that BDNF provides almost complete protection of brain cells not only from MPTP but from a variety of other mitochondrial neurotoxins. And in many of the reports, the methods by which BDNF is increased also come naturally: increased physical exercise and calorie reduction.

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