Is Your Brain on Fire? Why You Should Be Concerned About Neuroinflammation!
Brain Dysfunction is the Result of Neuroinflammation
Are you struggling with brain fog or depression? Have you ever, even as an infant, experienced a head injury in which you sustained a concussion, lost consciousness, or swelling of your head? If so, this article contains critical information you should know.
Injury to the brain happens more easily than you might think. Simply because it is encased in the bony structure of the skull doesn’t mean it wasn’t affected when you were injured. The definition of a traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a blow to the head or a penetrating head injury that disrupts the function of the brain. TBIs can range in severity from relatively “mild,” in which one experiences a brief change in mental status or consciousness, to “severe” wherein one loses consciousness or experiences amnesia for an extended period after the injury. Whether mild or severe, this type of injury can result in long-term cognitive disruption.
When an assault causes injury to the brain, the body’s immune system activates immune cells in the central nervous system and sends them to the site of the injury to repair the damage. This immune response results in neuroinflammation. You’ll learn as you read on how a seemingly insignificant head injury can result in changes to the cells in the brain, which can lead to neurodegeneration when there is a secondary assault to the brain, which may simply be exposure to mold or chemicals.
When this same kind of immune response takes place elsewhere in the body, inflammation is generally accompanied by pain. For instance, if you were to sprain your ankle, you would feel pain, and the tissue around the sprain would swell and turn red as a result of the blood sent to the area to generate a healing response. When you have an injury that inflames the brain, you will not feel pain because there are no nocioceptors that allow you to feel pain in your brain. Therefore, you cannot feel pain if your brain is inflamed. The first sign of neuroinflammation is loss of brain endurance, which means the brain fatigues after a short time. For instance, if you have trouble maintaining focus for 30 minutes or less, or you can’t focus long enough to read through to the end of this article, you may be suffering from brain fatigue.
Neuroinflammation can impede normal brain function and slow the transmission of signals between brain cells, which results in cognitive slowing. Signs of neuroinflammation include loss of brain function, (ie: brain fog), depression, anxiety, irritability, anger, fatigue, short-term memory decrements, and possible limb weakness (if the motor cortex is affected). These symptoms can differ based on the area of the brain impacted by the injury.
Brain Function in a Nutshell
Neurons are electrically excitable cells that transmit information from one neuron to the next across a synaptic cleft, which exists between neurons in the brain. When neurons are excited by voltage changes in the cells, a nerve impulse is generated, which results in the neuron firing information via a chemical messenger, a neurotransmitter, across the synaptic cleft to the neighboring neuron. If neurons are injured and can’t function properly, the result is a disruption of the transmission of neurotransmitters from one neuron to another, which results in loss of brain function. Neurons must be able to both send and receive signals in the process of this electrical transmission of information. If receptors are blocked or impaired, the postsynaptic neuron can’t receive the signal being sent by the presynaptic neuron.
The number of neurons you have at birth is the number you will have for the rest of your life. Because children have so many neurons when they are very young, they possess the capacity to learn vast amounts of information. Therefore, their neuronal network is prime for learning languages, and they are capable of learning much more than you might realize. As you grow older, some of your neurons will die, so there are fewer neurons between which synapses can form. Because older people have fewer neurons due to neuronal apoptosis (cell death), they tend to have cognitive slowing, such as slower reaction time. Neurons die because of an absence of the neuropeptide called nerve growth factor (NGF) that is responsible for growth and maintenance of certain neurons. Although most cells in your body are capable of regeneration through cell division, when your heart and brain cells die, they are forever gone, and there is nothing you can do to restore them. Because neurons are not able to regenerate, neuroscientists used to believe that damage to the brain was permanent and that, if you sustained a disabling brain injury, you were going to be disabled for the rest of your life.
What neuroscience has since discovered is that, despite the loss of neurons, the brain is capable of change to restore function that was lost due to injury. Brain function can be restored with the right kind of stimuli, and rehabilitation is focused on stimulating neuroplastic change in the brain to restore cognitive function. Neuroplasticity does not restore life to dead neurons; instead it restores function through neurogenesis, the formation of new synapses between existing neurons. By forcing the brain to learn new information specific to the area of the brain that is injured, new synapses are formed. An in-depth discussion of neuroplasticity is beyond the scope of this article, but you can develop an understanding of this phenomenon by reading the fascinating book, The Brain That Changes Itself by Dr. Norman Doidge. He presents this complex information in easily understandable terms. It is a “must read” if you are suffering from cognitive decline, because it will give you hope that your brain function can be restored.
Illuminating New Brain Research
For many decades, research on the brain was focused on neurons and neurotransmitters. What is surprising to most is that neurons make up only 10% of the cells in the brain; the other 90% are glial cells, the brain’s immune cells. While neuroscientists discovered glial cells in the 1800s, until the late 1990s, they believed glial cells had little to do with brain function and were merely the glue that held the brain together. To the contrary, recent brain research has demonstrated that glial cells play a significant role in brain health, as they support neuronal communication and neuroplasticity in the brain.
In the event of a traumatic brain injury, glial cells may become “primed,” which makes the brain vulnerable to a secondary assault of any kind, whether it be from an environmental toxin or a mild physical trauma to the skull. Glial cells that are primed morph from an active functioning cell with neuronal branches to an ameboid structure that has lost it branches and, therefore, its ability to function. For those who have suffered glial cell priming, maintaining brain health requires very careful dietary and lifestyle choices, such as avoiding alcohol and chemicals that can be damaging to their brains. They will require deliberate nutrient supplementation for the rest of their lives if they hope to avoid neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s Disease or dementia, which is almost assured if they don’t exercise caution. Therefore, it is important to recognize whether or not you may have glial priming. If you lost consciousness or experienced memory loss when you sustained a head injury, you almost certainly have glial priming. You can read more about this in this article printed in Neuropharmacology. 2015 Sep: 96 (0 ): 29-41. You can find it on the web at the following link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4430467/
Brain Imaging
Unfortunately, glial priming is not detectable on MRI. Glial priming can be measured through a specialized type of imaging, but this is only used in research. To have your brain imaged with this technique, you would have to be a research subject. However, you may want to consider one of the following brain imaging techniques:
· Functional brain MRI (fMRI) is used to map human brain function. It looks at brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. When an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region of the brain increases.
· Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS), measures temperature in the brain. A study conducted at the University of Alabama Birmingham found that healthy control subjects had brain temperatures around 99.5 degrees and those with brain inflammation had brain temperatures of 101.5 degrees. Although it doesn’t seem like much of a difference, it is a significant difference in the brain.
· SPECT Scan is Single-Photon Emission Computerized Tomography is a nuclear imaging test that uses radioactive substance and a specialized camera that produces 3-D images of the brain. SPECT technology shows what areas of the brain are underactive or overactive, which helps to determine appropriate treatment strategies to address these conditions. However, this imaging technique is not covered by insurance and requires you to travel to one of the eight Amen clinics in the US to have it done.
If your cognitive function has diminished since you were younger, understand that cognitive decline is not a normal function of aging. If are concerned you have glial priming, you need to educate yourself about how to save your brain from neurodegeneration. Realize that there is a “point of no return” with neurodegeneration, and if you have a neurodegenerative disease that has progressed to that point, you may be able to take pharmaceuticals to slow the progression of the disease, but nothing can be done to restore your brain function when it has passed the “point of no return.”
If you know your brain isn’t functioning as well as it once did, you may be suffering from neuroinflammation, which will undoubtedly, progress to a neurodegenerative disease if you don’t take necessary steps to reduce the inflammation in your brain. A conventionally trained neurologist may tell you that your brain is fine after doing an MRI, which looks at soft tissue and structural abnormalities and can detect stroke, dementia, and multiple sclerosis but cannot reveal any information about brain function like a functional MRI can. If you know your brain isn’t functioning as well as it once did and are still struggling with brain dysfunction, there is something wrong!!! Most neurologists don’t have access to technology that measures neuroinflammation, and their training stops short of recognizing brain dysfunction until cognitive impairment has advanced to a significant degree. I know this, not only from my functional neurology training but from personal experience when my brain was injured by toxic mold. My brain dysfunction was dramatically impaired, and I had two neurologists in highly-respected teaching hospitals tell me that there was nothing wrong with my brain. They didn’t know my baseline level of functioning and decided that there was nothing wrong with my brain, because I could tell them who the current US president was, the name of the street their office was on, had no motor weakness, and no abnormalities in my MRI. But I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my brain was not healthy!! I knew my level of cognitive functioning had markedly diminished!!! So I pursued neuropsychological testing, which confirmed that there was significant impairment in the right parietal lobe of my brain.
If you are told your there is nothing wrong with your brain because your MRI is normal, but you continue to struggle with brain dysfunction, don’t let health care practitioners who are not trained in functional neurology make you question your own reality. Seek help from someone who is functional neurology trained. At Synergy Health Solutions, we have a program that will evaluate your brain function and a protocol to help you restore your brain function. It worked for me, and I believe, if you are motivated to do what it takes, it will work for you. Don’t wait until it is too late!
In good health,
Valerie Folsom-Martin, MSW, LCSW, CIMHP, CCTP, FDN-P, CHHC
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