Change Your Brain Every Day - Brain in the News: How Covid Can Affect Existing Mental Health Conditions

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen go over the latest health statistics and Covid research. They discuss healthy anxiety and the different messaging about social distancing. 

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We're talking about letting go, the brain attachment and letting go. But this week, we're going to talk about Brain in the News. There are a couple of big studies in the news. One is just horrifying. Yeah. You have a review. I have a review first, and this is cognitive conclusions.

I think you are an amazing human being. Love your podcast. I feel so late to have just found this. I have seen some of your stuff online and just love your approach to mental health overall. Big advocate for mental health. You're probably one of the few psychiatrists I actually respect. I'll be listening from now on. Keep blessing people with your gifts and genuine concern for others and their overall health, which is mostly mental. Love it. Love it. All right. Bring in the news. What's going on in

the news? Study yesterday, erectile dysfunction, six times more likely for men who've been infected with COVID. Ouch. Oh my goodness. It causes inflammation. Inflammation can make your blood vessels less pliable, less responsive, and that can impact your relationship i mean a lot of people get nervous when you talk about sex but um there's one study actually from harvard

that showed 40 of 40 year old men had erectile dysfunction at some point. Horrifying. 70% of 70-year-old men. Wow. And now, if you've been infected with COVID, those numbers even go higher. And often, we know COVID has more negative consequences for people who are unhealthy. If they're overweight or hypertensive or have diabetes, and we have often said your best defense against COVID is your own immune system. There's a new study out on people have long haulers that if they get the vaccine,

it actually helps a number of people with it. I'm not exactly sure why. That's interesting. But maybe it's an extra boost to their immune system to fight the virus that sort of sticks around too long. But, you know, a lot of people get Lyme disease and don't have chronic Lyme right but there clearly is a group that have Lyme disease that end up well I find it so interesting that COVID actually causes brain inflammation I mean it crosses that blood-brain

barrier um I just find that really fascinating I think we just don't know everything yet well I have about 50 COVID scans and actually a number of them with before and after scans. We got them before and then later, and it's not good news. It increases activity in the limbic or the emotional part of the brain. There was a new study also out this week from the journal Lancet, where they looked at medical records of millions of people, and they found 287,000 who had COVID. And then they looked at new diagnoses of mental health conditions and compared them to new diagnoses of people who had the flu and significant increases anxiety depression insomnia psychosis which is horrifying dementia, Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's? Yeah. The COVID can impact your brain.

Yeah. And so doing what you can to avoid it, if you can, right? Masks, wash your hands, physical distancing, not social distancing. Socially, we want to be more connected. I think that was one of the big mistakes early in the pandemic, is we want to be physically distancing so the virus

doesn't jump from me to you. But we want to be socially more connected than ever before. But we're going to find this virus like a number of of other viruses at Steam Bar, for example, or herpes, can cross the blood brain barrier and can wreak havoc. And I don't really want to say on your mental health, because it's your brain health, because your brain creates your mind. There's another study out recently, the increased risk of traumatic brain injuries among parents and children who have attention deficit disorder. And I've known this for a long time because of the level of impulsivity that you might not think before you run in the street. One of my daughters was hyperactive from before birth. She just had no fear. That's like her own child now who terrifies me when she comes over here.

Terrifies me. Yeah, she's a bit better. She's so cute. But I mean, I'm terrified. Because there's no fear. No, she literally doesn't even hesitate. She just runs straight into the pool. When no one's standing there.

Scary as heck so um the study that um was published children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are vulnerable to traumatic brain injuries uh they experience undesirable impacts more frequently uh than children without. And this was actually a study from Taiwan. And people who have untreated ADD have a higher incidence of almost every bad. That's what I was just going to ask. I wonder what the rate is of kids who do experience things like drownings or, you know, you wonder how many of them had

add or adhd or get into medications and or guns because i have a child who i have a child who borders ocd um she has a very very busy brain i mean we've always had to like give her supplements to sort of calm her down but she's the opposite terrified of almost everything which i'm okay with i'm not going to say i hate that but i wonder because i see her versus her friends some of who are extremely impulsive and they get into trouble and i wonder how much of that has to do with adhd it has to do with brain function for sure and your brain type you can actually find your brain type at brainhealthassessment.com. But people who are type 2, their ADD group, they're spontaneous. They're impulsive.

And not all of them. They often don't think about the consequences, most of them, that are just type 2. Oh, just type 2. Okay. There are 16 types. If you're anxious and cautious, that's you. Right. You can have that ADD and cautious, that's you. Right.

Then you're more thoughtful. Right. Then you're more thoughtful and more afraid. And what we often say is some anxiety is important. Right. And they tend to have lower cortisol levels. Oh, interesting. And lower heart rates, lower frontal lobe function, which means they don't have appropriate fear. And so I used to think, you know, being a psychiatrist, my job was to lower people's anxiety. Not necessarily. And it's like, not for everybody. Some people need to really raise their anxiety.

So where's your anxiety at today? Do you have enough where you're being really thoughtful about the pandemic and COVID and your health. Or do you have too much? Is it paralyzing you? Or does it paralyze you? And what are the ways to balance it? We don't want you to believe every stupid thought you have,

which is why I collect anteaters. They're going to become a big part of the future. But you also don't want to have positive pie in the sky, happy thoughts that aren't rational, that you want to have appropriate fear. So it's really the balance between enough anxiety, you make the right decisions, but not too much anxiety that you feel frozen. Right. So that's Brain in the News for this week. And please post what you've learned. Tag someone, tag us. We'd love to hear from you. And send us a review. We would love to get a review from you. And if we read your review, it enters you into a drawing to win one of our books, either

Daniel's book, Your Brain Is Always Listening, or my book, The Relentless Courage of a Scared Child. And we will be back with your questions. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.