Mind and Motor

From the headlines this week,

Footprints to Cognitive Decline and Alzheimer’s Are Seen in Gait

We've long known that motor activity and cognition are married together.  They are both heavily dependent on the frontal lobe.  Also, we know that motor activity is often used to help us think.  For example, there has been research that shows that gesturing while speaking facilitates our thoughts.  While we once thought that it allowed us to communicate more clearly with a person across from us, we know that it goes deeper and revs up or cognitive engine.

In this article, we see yet another example of the marriage between motor activity, in this case gait, and cognition.  We see that the studies, "provide striking evidence that when a person’s walk gets slower or becomes more variable or less controlled, his cognitive function is also suffering."

While this research is fascinating, in some ways, it shouldn't come as a surprise.  There is lots of research that shows that physical exercise improves cognitive function and can slow the progression of degenerative conditions.  In other words, the mind and motor marriage has been speculated upon and elucidated over the past 2 decades.

Even so, this article gives non-physicians a clear symptom to watch for in their loved ones.  When the gait begins to change, there may be degenerative changes beginning in the brain.

Your Brain on Sugar

In this blog, you may have already read about how insulin can wreak havoc on the body. This refers to the excessive insulin released under conditions of insulin resistance. In other words, if you eat too much sugar, you release too much insulin and over time.... your body stops listening to insulin. This is bad.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that insulin may actually help treat Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Klein, one of the authors of the study, is quoted as saying, "Sensitivity to insulin can decline with aging, which presents a novel risk factor for Alzheimer's disease."

In other words, insulin resistance can set you up for Alzheimer's disease. When you have insulin resistance, you need even more insulin to get the message across to your body. It appears that in this case, insulin may have some protective effect on the brain... (brains that are having trouble processing insulin).

This does not mean you should eat more sugar to produce more insulin to protect the brain! It means you should carefully regulate blood sugar so you don't develop insulin resistance so you can save your brain.