LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

inflammation

DO THIS TO LOWER YOUR RISK OF PRETERM BIRTH

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It is very well accepted that there are many things that can be done to contribute to a healthy, full term pregnancy. The healthier the couple is prior to conception (yes–BOTH parents), the NON-reliance on assisted reproductive technologies to achieve pregnancy and the better mom takes care of herself during the pregnancy to greater the likelihood that the pregnancy will be uneventful. So what specific things can we do?

One thing that has been linked to preterm birth is inflammation. Inflammation can be driven by an uncontrolled infection somewhere in the body. Bacterial vaginosis (infection in the vaginal vault) has been linked to preterm birth. Higher intakes of healthy fats in the form of wild caught, low mercury seafood has been shown to lower the risk of preterm birth. This is likely because a higher intake of omega-3 fatty acids along with a decrease in omega-6 fatty acids is anti-inflammatory.

This particular article gives additional insight into how controlling infection in the body can have an impact.

In pregnant women with periodontal disease who refused dental care, the use of a non-alcohol antiseptic mouthwash was associated with a 74% reduction in the risk of a preterm birth. 74%!! What a simple intervention to have a massive impact. On the reverse side of prevention, it should make us all reconsider what poor lifestyle habits that contribute to inflammation will do to the trajectory of an otherwise healthy pregnancy.

DIET LEADS TO MORE AGGRESSIVE CANCER

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DIET LEADS TO MORE AGGRESSIVE CANCER. For years now, we have understood that diet strongly drives how much inflammation our bodies have. This mean joint pain, headaches, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, autoimmune conditions like RA, Lupus, psoriasis…did I miss any?

In the human body, I consider inflammation as a giant domino setup. To the left is a large number of dominos all aiming towards one single gold domino. To the right expands out more dominos. Knock down one of the left dominos, and ultimately the gold dominio goes. Knock the gold domino down and you start the cascade of other dominos we know as inflammation. Rows out to the right are where our drugs come in–AFTER the gold domino has fallen. To the left is lifestyle. Preserve these and the gold domino stands. This gold domino has a name and plays a role in : NF kappa B.

Read entire article here

WHICH DISEASE HAS INFLAMMATION BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH?

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Feeling inflamed? Try B6… Inflammation has been associated with pretty much every chronic disease you can think of, but most notably heart disease.  Mainstream medicine has been slow to adopt the concept of hsCRP as a marker of inflammation and a risk for heart disease, despite quite a few years and quite a few studies.

Part of this may be because there has been no drug that has been shown to effectively lower hsCRP levels.  As the relationship between high cholesterol and heart disease has been decimated, there have been some desperate attempts to find a better use for the multi billion dollar statin class of drugs.

However, the studies show that it’s pretty weak at lowering hsCRP.  But who needs a drug when B6 can do it along w/ fish oils, exercise and stress management?

INFLAMMATION LEADS TO DEPRESSION IN ELDERLY

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Psychological problems seem to be everywhere in today’s society.  The knee jerk reaction is to medicate.  The problem with these drugs is that they really don’t hold up to well against placebo.  As a matter of fact, for the vast majority of patients, they are just plain ineffective.

Before we go into the gist of this article, we need to cover some basic neurochemistry.  There are certain amino acids that our body’s use to convert to neurotransmitters.  The most famous of which is probably tryptophan, which the body uses to convert to serotonin.  Tyrosine gets converted to epinephrine and norepinephrine (adrenaline) in the adrenals as well as dopamine in the dopaminergic cells of the brain.  Using this knowledge, you can actually use supplements containing tryrosine and / or 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP) to help manage depression or anxiety.

This particular study takes an interesting look at what inflammation does to these amino acids in the elderly.  The enzyme indoleamine-2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) breaks down tryptophan, keeping it from being used to make serotonin.  Inflammation seem to speed up this enzyme, breaking down tryptophan before it can be used to produce serotonin and help the brain and our moods function better.

The enzyme guanosine-triphosphate-cyclohydrolase-1 (GTPCH1) is required to produce a compound called BH4, which the body then uses to produce, ultimately, tyrosine and the neurotransmitters noted above.

If all this seems a little too complex for dinner conversation, just remember that inflammation is a major player in much of what goes on in our bodies and brains.  Managing any concern or condition (in this particular case, psychological problems in the elderly) needs to incorporate methods to lower inflammation.

This means a plant based diet.  Lowering of omega-6 fatty acids and increased intakes of omega-3.  It means no processed foods.  Exercise.  Stress management.  The list is almost endless. 

The bottom line is that treatment of any psychological problem needs to encompass the entire body to be the most effective it can be.  Anything short of this is not good medicine.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322310012783

YOU NEED TO TAKE THIS WITH YOUR OSTEOPOROSIS DRUG

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While I hope that things will change as time and research moves on, I do not remember a time that a patient has come into my office that had been placed on some type of anti-resorptive therapy (Fosamax, Boniva, Actonel, Zometa) for osteoporosis that were recommended to take anything other than calcium.  As current research is demonstrating, this recommendation falls far short of providing a benefit.

Remember that these drugs do NOT add bone.  Most everyone seems to be under this impression, but it is not true.  They merely slow down our body’s breakdown of bone by irreversibly binding the osteoclast cells that break down bone.  The standard recommendation has been to take calcium, but this again is falling short in the recent research.  And keep in mind that a large chunk of people taking this class of drugs do not respond at all (this article notes the number is about 30%).

Vitamin D, however, stands strong in bone health.  This particular study looks at patients’ response to drug therapy and finds that, in those with low levels of Vitamin D, they did not respond to the drug.  Imagine the decades that these drugs have been used and the ramifications of this study.  Not only are we treating bone density issues inappropriately (more on this in a minute), but it means we have been falling short on what benefit there may be by taking years for clinical recommendations from the research to be put into play.

A few side notes.  First, osteopenia vs osteoporosis.  WE DO NOT USE DRUGS TO TREAT OSTEOPENIA!!!!!!!!!!!!  Ugh!!  Can’t tell you how often I have to address this issue.  There are no clinical trials or drug approvals that I’m aware of (could just be out of date) that use drug therapy to treat osteopenia.  Why?  Because the actual risk of fracture is someone with osteopenia is very low.  Rather, it is an indication that the trajectory of bone health is in the wrong direction.  This is a lifestyle issue that needs to be fixed.

So, if the risk at that point in life is very low, that means that, to lower the risk of fracture in the future when the risk becomes more imminent, the patient will need to be on these drugs for a long time.  However, the research suggests that 3-5 years is about how long someone should be on these drugs because it increases the risk of atypical fractures.  Thus, you do NOT medicate osteopenia!

On to the real problem.  Bone health is a lifestyle issue.  It has to do with activity levels.  Vitamin D levels.  It has to deal with inflammation (increased inflammation makes more of the osteoclasts that break down bone so, more inflammation = more bone breakdown).  It has to deal with poor digestion / gut stress.  And yes–I said the gut.  Growing evidence is suggesting that the gut and serotonin derived from the gut when it is inflamed is a major player in bone loss.

So you can see why the recommendations to just add calcium or to take Fosamax is very short sighted and in no way addresses the real concerns that have to deal with bone health.

http://www.natap.org/2011/newsUpdates/061311_08.htm

INFLAMMATION CAN DESTROY YOUR BONES

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Inflammation.  We hear the term tossed around an awful lot in today’s healthcare / chronic disease environment.  But not everyone understands what this means.  Most of us are familar with the inflammation that comes from a sprained ankle.  The hallmarks of inflammation are calor (heat), tumor (swelling), rubor (redness) and dolaor (pain) and all these come to mind when dealing with a sprain.  This process is mediated by chemicals that are designed to stem the damage and fix the injury.

But what about the flu?  A bacterial infection?  The same process occurs, but it is no longer localized to the injured area.  The chemicals released flow throughout the body.  The number of chemicals is quite large and consists of molecules called cytokines and consists of  interluekins, chemokines and lymphokines.  The secretion of these compounds determine our body’s response to a percieved or actual problem.  The balance of their activity is akin to a massively complex orchestra; send it out of tune and the results can be devastating.

In this particular article, researchers looked more closely at the finding that inflammation has a strong detrimental effect on bone health.  While they were able to confirm that inflamation indeed sucks calcium out of bones, what they find is not so simple.  It appears that different aspects of the immune system will pull calcium from the bones, while other aspects protect the bone.

Until we get a clearer picture, the key concept here is immune balance.  This is, of course, achieved early in life by making sure we have the right bacteria in our gut, breastfeed as long as possible, avoid unneccesary immunization and, later in life keep our gut and oral health up, identify food allergies such as gluten, eat a diet high in minerals like zinc, potassium and calcium as well as phytonutrients and keep optimal levels of Vitamin D in our bloodstream.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2362.2011.02545.x/abstract

USING CT TO LOOK AT YOUR HEART VESSELS

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Something that is not well understood by the general population (except devout readers of my rantings…) is that there is plaquing of the arteries and there is plaquing of the arteries.  None of it is good and it is a sign of poor vascular health.  But without a doubt, the soft, vulnerable plaque is far more dangerous than the hard, stable plaque.

Picture a nice, wide open blood vessel that has some plaquing in it.  The plaque takes up maybe 10% of the opening of the canal.  If it’s a stable plaque this is just fine.  Plenty of blood flow and oxygen are getting the heart.  Your treadmill stress test comes through with shining colors. 

But what if the plaque is unstable?  That mass taking up 10% of the lumen of a large blood vessel, but now it breaks free and works its way into a smaller vessel, taking up most of the canal, starving the heart muscles for oxygen and causing a heart attack.  The stress test on this plaqued artery prior to the mass breaking off?  Again passed with shining colors.

What??  Am I saying that you can drop dead of a massive heart attack leaving a perfectly healthy stress test?  Yup.  And it all boils down to the stability of a plaque.  So how do we know? 

First, this study looks at the ability of CT scan to identify the soft vs hard, stable plaques and finds that it does a pretty good job.  Not too shabby.  Next, we can easily check lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA2, or PLAC test for short) in the blood.  This test has some pretty strong correlation with being able to predict if any plaques are unstable and ready to rupture.

Even more importantly, what can we do to make sure any plaques were are sporting are the stable type?  Exercise, higher intake of healthy fats (raw nuts, seeds, wild caught fish, avacodos, flax, olive oil, etc..) and lowering our levels of inflammation (see earlier blog postings) all increase the stability of a plaque.

Of course, making sure they’re not there in the first place sounds more preferable to me.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002914911003912

GETTING A CARDIAC STENT? CHECK THIS FIRST…

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Regardless of whether you’re on the cath table just starting to fade away from the anesthesia or are reading this from home, inflammation is a major, massive player in heart disease.  We’ve spent so much time focusing on cholesterol levels, mainly because we had a drug that could lower this value so we fit the disease risk factors to the drug that could control that risk factor.  Only recently has inflammation (usually as measured with hsCRP) been looked at as a risk factor.

Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is the procedure in which a cardiologist pokes a camera into your coronary arteries to look at how healthy they appear.  If there is a problem, the common answer is to place a stent in a blocked artery to make sure that blood continues to flow through this artery to feed the heart.  The big problem with this procedure is that these stents have a tendency to plug back up again (restenosis).  Two schools of thought exist– the use of bare metal stents or the use of drug eluting stents to lower the risk of restenosis.  In this particular study, researchers determined that the inflammation levels were a major determinant in which a bare metal stent or a drug eluting one should be used.

Less simplify this.  Manage your inflammation long before you need a stent and the decision won’t be there to make.  Exercise, live an anti-diabetic lifestyle, stress less, add a multivitamin, D and mixed tocopherols (Vit E) as well as fix any silent sources of inflammation like poor oral health, poor gut health or food allergies.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002914911003869