LifeCare Chiropractic

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adiponectin

Exercise, Memory, Depression and Your Brain; Great News!

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The list of things you can do to protect your brain and improve brain function is quite long, but there is one things that is always at the top.

Exercise.

There is absolutely, positively no doubt that exercise is incredibly important for your brain.  And this is regardless of what you are worried about or what you are dealing with.  Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, depression, anxiety, chronic migraine headaches, seizures, multiple sclerosis…

Sadly, this tool is brought into play far too seldom.  The second you walk into your neurologist’s door, the first question he or she should be asking is how is your exercise routine going. All too frequently medications are the only item of discussion.

How exactly exercise helps the brain is yet to be figured out, but it’s likely working by several mechanisms:

  1. Improved blood flow to the brain.  More blood flow means more nutrients and healthier brain cells.
  2. Release of the hormone irisin through exercise.
  3. Muscles use glucose.  More muscle means better glycemic control and lowered risk of diabetes.  Prediabetes and diabetes destroy the brain.

And probably several more ways that I can’t think of right now.  This particular article adds to the list.  In it, researchers looked at the effect of the hormone adiponectin on the brains of mice.

Adiponectin is a hormone produced by the fat cells in the abdomen.  This hormone is essentially an anti-diabetes hormone.  As I mentioned, since diabetes is so bad for the brain, it might make sense that adiponectin would have positive effects on the cells of the brain.

But the specifics are what were so surprising:

  • Adiponectin can cross the blood–brain barrier.  Higher levels in the brain increased the number of brain cells and decreased depression-like behaviors.
  • A deficiency of adiponectin, however, cut short the beneficial effects of exercise in increasing the number of brain cells in the hippocampus (the region affected by Alzheimer’s dementia).

Because researchers were using mice, they were able to modify the hormone levels.  But, in your own brain, these same effects can be achieved through a combination of living an anti-diabetic lifestyle and exercise.

The anti-diabetic lifestyle will increase the levels of adiponectin being released by your fat cells.  The higher levels of adiponectin will give you the best possible effects of exercise on your brain.  Specifically, according the this study, the hippocampal region of your brain will benefit.  This is the region that is heavily involved with memory.

So, if you are a migraine sufferrer, it is not exercise alone that is going to protect your brain and your memory.  Exercise needs to be coupled with an anti-diabetic diet to have the full effect on protecting your brain.

Want to avoid Alzheimer’s dementia?  Same story.

Depression?  Anxiety?  Same story.

Get the point?  You cannot change or improve one aspect of your lifestyle without making changes in other areas as well.  Anything less will not give you the full benefit.

 

Are You Carrying Around an Extra Organ? 3 Things to Know

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Your ancestors didn’t have it, and yet there’s a good chance you do. Most of your organs work in your favor, but this one is your enemy.

Much like some disconnected appendage transplanted in place of your severed hand that came from a serial killer, your abdominal fat is trying to kill you.  I have written about abdominal fat as a renegade organ in a previous blog article that can be read by clicking here.  Before we get into the “guts” of this blog post, we need a little review of adipose hormones.

While the abdominal fat tissue produces a number of compounds, there are 3 main hormones that come from our abdominal fat cells that we are currently aware of.  Here’s a brief summary:

  1. Leptin – helps to maintain an even body weight.  Lose abdominal fat and lower leptin stimulates appetite, gain fat and higher leptin levels make you less hungry.  Unfortunately, with abuse, our brains become resistant to leptin, and higher levels no longer shut down our appetite.
  2. Resistin – levels increase as the amount of abdominal fat increases and increases inflammation, insulin resistance and drives the progression to diabetes.
  3. Adiponectin – an anti-diabetic hormone that is produced less and less as we gather more abdominal fat.

When were are healthy, these adipokines help to keep your body weight in balance.  However, as you start to collect more abdominal fat over time, these adipokines shift from a friendly distribution to a disease-causing one.  This then produces more inflammation which, in turn, produces even more body fat.  Quite the downhill spiral.

This particular study looks more closely at the actions of adiponectin in mice and how it relates to blood flow within the abdominal fat region.  Here’s what researchers found:

  • Higher levels of adiponectin led to a more blood flow within the fat tissue (which leads to “happier” fat cells with more blood flow and nutrients).
  • Mice that produced more adiponectin had an almost complete shut down of inflammation measured by macrophage (WBC) infiltration and had no crown-like structures (these structures occur when dead fat cells clump together around macrophages that are trying to clean up the dying tissues).
  • Mice that produced more adiponectin had a strong sensitivity to insulin and reduced likelihood of developing fatty liver.

You can see that, once you begin to accumulate abdominal fat your body begins to revolt against you, stacking the cards against you for losing and maintaining weight loss.  Obviously, prevention is much easier than a cure, but for most of us, that train long ago left the station.  We can, however, make sure that our children are not put into a similar situation by making sure they never tip over into a state of increased abdominal obesity.

I also have to put a plug in here for non-invasive laser liposuction, which we have had in our office for almost a year now.  While the manufacturers and most clinics that own the units continue to promote that laser “opens pores in the fat cells,” there is strong evidence that laser applied to the abdominal region is doing what we know that cold laser does: increasing blood flow and lowering inflammation.

What a perfect combination for abdominal fat that is both starved for blood flow and inflamed.  This explanation for the benefits of laser lipo makes sense.

PPAR Ligands Increase Concentrations of Adiponectin – (08-27-01)

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PPAR Ligands Increase Concentrations of Adiponectin

The new diabetes drugs in the thiazolidinediones family are PPAR ligands (mimic the action), but researchers have been unaware as to how this action effected the body. This article sheds some light on this process. Authors found that the PPAR ligands stimulate an increase in the hormone adiponectin; a hormone that has multiple affects on insulin sensitivity and damages caused by increased insulin resistance.

Diabetes — Abstracts: Maeda et al. 50 (9): 2094

Read entire article here

The OTHER Organ You May Have That You Don’t Know You Have

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Ask any high school kid to list the organs of the body and you’ll get the typical responses: Heart, liver, brain, kidneys, stomach. Maybe even an adrenal If he or she stayed awake in biology.  But some organ systems are created, not provided in the womb.

Sure, some consider the bacteria in the gut as its own organ system.  After all, it detoxifies, protects from invaders and releases hordes of chemical signals.  Despite the poor overall knowledge of this organ system, it’s not the one I’m talking about here.

This particular organ system is not present in everyone, although, unfortunately, it is present in far too large of a percentage of today’s population.

It produces a very large number of hormones that drive your risk of diabetes, heart health, inflammation and other conditions, all bad.  Worse, the weight of this organ may constitute up to HALF of your body weight.  That’s a big organ.

It’s the (or YOUR, if that’s the case) adipose tissue.  Most notably the gut.

Yes, the gut.  And you just thought it was there to keep you from checking out your toes on a regular basis.

Here’s the current theory.  The fat cells in your gut begin as extra calorie storage locations.  Adipose tissue in other areas of the body, like around the heart and thighs, although have this duty, but it’s the gut we normal point to as the greatest reservoir of extra calories.

That’s fine and dandy for a while.  Or, if you plan on hibernating and need the calories while you sleep through football season, then this is okay as well.

But gather too much extra tissue in that abdominal region and blood flow becomes an issue.  After all, the fat cells need nutrients in and waste products out as well, and if this process becomes congested, your fat cells are going to get a little upset with you.

This kick off the survival mode of your little abdominal buddy, leading to the production of hormones referred to as adipokines with names like visfatin, adiponectin and resistin.

These hormones are bad enough on their own, but there’s another problem brewing.  The adipose tissue contains a large number of stem cells, referred to as hematopoietic cells.  These cells can differentiate into immune cells that can be a major driver in inflammation.

This particular review gets a little more specific, stating that a single gram of adipose tissue can contain up to 5 million stromal vascular fraction (SVF) cells.  About half of these cells (not counting the fat cells themselves) are white blood cells.

If you do the math and the Metric to English measurement conversions, that’s an awful lot of immune cells available to affect the rest of your system.

I’ve become very adept at explaining this concept recently because our office has begun using a laser liposuction device.  Laser, from a musculoskeletal-sprain-strain-pain based standpoint, has been known for decades to lower inflammation and increase blood flow.  Kind of a perfect salve for this inflamed, hypoxic organ too many of us are carrying around our middles.  (You can read more about this laser lipo procedure by on our website by clicking here)

Overall, though, the take home message is that the lump around your middle does not just affect the way you’re going to look in that Speedo, it drives a very dangerous and damaging organ that catapults you towards chronic disease and an early death.

 

Adiponectin reverses insulin resistance – (08-06-01)

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Adiponectin reverses insulin resistance

Here is another example of a newly discovered hormone that plays a role in insulin/weight management. Keep an eye out for this one; this is a mouse study but the impact on human health is huge. The fat-derived hormone adiponectin reverses insulin resistance associated with both lipoatrophy and obesity.

Read entire article here

Weight Loss Increases Adipose-Derived Anti-Inflammatory Adiponectin – (08-20-01)

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Weight Loss Increases Adipose-Derived Anti-Inflammatory Adiponectin

Two things here. First, keep your ears open for adiponectin. It is a newly identified protein that may play a key role in hormone modulation of obesity and inflammation. Second, we see the tangled web that is woven in health and disease. As we gain adipose tissue, levels of adiponectin are reduced and inflammation may rise, leading to many other disease states. Once the dominoes of bad health begin to fall, the pieces are set in motion. On the other hand, on the road back to health, once these factors start working in our favor, many aspects of biochemistry fall back into place.

JCEM — Abstracts: Yang et al. 86 (8): 3815

Read entire article here

MASSIVELY LOWER YOUR RISK OF ARTHRITIS

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Arthritis is a pretty darn common finding as we start to get older.  I’ve seen it present in the spine of an 18 year old football player and the knees of 90 year olds, with everything in between.  Trauma clearly plays a role, but does not answer everything.  Turns out there are some pretty powerful ways to lower our risk of developing arthritis in the future.

One of the newer hormones on the scene of body composition and risk of diabetes is adiponectin.  Adiponectin is produced by the adipose (fat) cells.  Despite its origins, this hormone packs a wallop when it comes to making our bodies handle glucose better, keeping us leaner and pushing us away from diabetes.  Higher is better.

So what does the hormone adiponectin have to do with arthritis?  Above and beyond anything else, a good healthy lifestyle will protect against arthritis, especially of the spine.  In this study, those with the highest levels of adiponectin had a massive 70% lower risk of having hand arthritis, that was already present, from progressing.

Forget glucosamine and start addressing the rest of your lifestyle.

http://ard.bmj.com/content/70/7/1282.abstract