Change Your Brain Every Day - Head Trauma, Cardiac Arrest and Its Effects on Your Brain

Episode Date: February 7, 2017

There are a number of ailments and injuries that can greatly affect our brain functions, and probably the two most common which we're going to talk about today is head trauma and cardiac arrest.  If you want to know how these two can affect your brain functions, be sure to listen to this short podcast.   

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Hi, doctor. My name is Pam. And three years ago, I had a brain hemorrhage while snow skiing. And I just wondered if because of that trauma to my brain, does that enhance my chances of having either dementia or Alzheimer's in the future? And should I follow up with scans in the near future because of that trauma? Yes. So the answer is yes to both of those. So if you've had trauma and you subsequently had a bleed, what happens is it decreases the reserve in your brain. So let me just talk about this concept for a minute. All of us have reserve in our brain. So when you're conceived, your brain is designed with a lot of reserve. So if your mom's healthy in her pregnancy with you, then when you're born, you have all sorts of reserve.

But if she wasn't, she drank, she was chronically stressed, she had viral infections. She had low levels of vitamin D or omega-3 fatty acids. And your reserve is not so great. But say you're born with a lot of reserve and you had great parents and they fed you really good food and they exposed you to great learning and not a lot of stress. Your brain has a lot of reserve. But say you're raised in an alcoholic home and people are fighting a lot and there's chronic stress and not good supervision. And maybe you fall down a flight of stairs or they let you play tackle football. You can just see the reserve in your brain is going to go down. And even though you may never be symptomatic, the more your reserve goes down, when you get an accident

like you had, that is actually what determines whether or not you become symptomatic or not. So I always want to be increasing my brain's reserve. There's another thing that decreases your brain's reserve is aging. As you age, your brain gets less and less active. And so then having an injury decreases it further. So one, you want to know, how do you know unless you look, if there is any residual effect of that, and if there is, be aggressive as early as you can to try to reverse the damage. So a lot of our athletes, for example, have terrible reserve and they're symptomatic and their brains look awful. But by getting on the right program, by getting physically healthy, using the supplements, even in some cases doing hyperbaric oxygen treatment, we've been able to boost their brain's reserve,

thereby decreasing their chances for dementia. Okay. Thank you. Hi, my name is Suzanne De La Flora. I have a little different situation. My husband was on the treadmill and had a cardiac arrest and he went down and he now has short-term memory loss. He was in a coma for a month and it's really bad. He's a big trial lawyer in San Diego and we're shutting our firm. And is there any hope? Because when you go online and you look at cardiac arrest, short-term memory, there's no hope at all. So when you have cardiac arrest, actually I have a patient that I'm working with right now who was young and had a cardiac arrest. And her brain afterwards just looked terrible because of the lack of oxygen. So your brain is very oxygen sensitive. And so if you have any kind of event that stops your heart or prevents blood flow to your brain, it can cause

fairly severe damage. What we can see on scans is, is that area with short-term memory? So it's either his hippocampus or the lateral outside of his prefrontal cortex. So we can actually see, is it dead or is it sleeping? If it's sleepy, then doing things like the right supplements, sometimes medications, hyperbaric oxygen treatment, or other kinds of things to stimulate the brain can be very helpful. From my perspective, I would go, well, how do I really know what's going on in those areas unless I look? So imaging for his brain is very important and not an MRI or a CT scan. Those are anatomy scans.

They show what the brain actually physically looks like. You want to get something like PET or SPECT, what we do, because then we can actually see what's the functional level in that part of his brain. So I would have hope, keep doing the smart things because that's going to prevent a deterioration in his cognitive function over time. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Hi, Dr. Amen. I'm Jackie. I want to start out with some gratitude for your passion in this area. I'm a marriage family therapist and I got interested in your work about nine years ago when there was clients that nobody could do anything with and you could. And so I was encouraged to have my husband go see you, and nobody could do anything with him, including me, and you could. That's a great testimony. I'm grateful. We have so many husbands who see us

on the threat of divorce. They don't want to be there. It's like she said, look, go. I've already talked to the attorney. I do a lot of work with addicts, and they seem pretty convinced that pot is very good for the brain and okay for the brain. And I was interested in any of your research about the actual negative effects of pot on the brain. Well, you know, I understand why people smoke pot, because it calms things down, and they're less anxious and less depressed.

But it calms things down, like everything. And they have memory problems, and they have coordination problems. And I actually treat someone who's been smoking pot for about 50 years, and he has dementia. And what we see on scans is the brain start to take on a toxic look, and it's not healthy. It's not good medicine. There are other ways to deal with your anxiety

and depression that are simple, that don't have side effects, and I think are just more important. All right. Thanks, because I had heard that it actually nukes the dopamine receptor sites. Is that something that it might destroy? People feel really happy, which means it's releasing dopamine, but at the same time, it's toxic for them. And you never want to mess with your dopamine receptors because it's what gives you pleasure. And so if you do too many things that give you pleasure, cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana, alcohol, you wear those things out, and then pretty soon you just feel depressed. You feel there's a term we call anhedonic, which means you just don't feel pleasure at all. Anybody wonder, besides me, why some of these very

famous athletes that are highly accomplished, their lives just go in this tailspin? You know, we've seen a number of examples. It's because their pleasure centers have been worn out. And so, you know, they either go off to cocaine or alcohol or to six women at once. And, you know, that's the only way they, like, feel alive. So I'm like, always protect your pleasure center. Thank you. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way.

Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.