A Breakthrough on Turning Brain Damage Around

You’re probably aware of the brain damage professional football players can suffer. Until recently there wasn’t a lot of things that could be done to help stem their suffering.

Enter Daniel Amen who has been using SPECT scans to see what’s going on in the player’s brains and what things can improve functioning. SPECT uses what he calls single photon emission computerized tomography and radioactive tracers to detect blood flow to tissues and organs. 

The amount of radiation is the equivalent of a CT scan of the head.

BTW, Amen was the medical consultant on the film Concussion about the doc who discovered the brain damage football players were suffering.

Amen has viewed more than 160,000 brain SPECT scans and has detected distinct blood flow patterns that are specific to common brain disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and learning disabilities. 

They can even distinguish between traumatic brain injury and PTSD. This is important because while both conditions have similar symptoms, they have very different treatment approaches.

Using SPECT scans, Amen was able to study 30 retired football players with brain damage and cognitive impairment from repeated head injuries and substance abuse. The players were encouraged to lose weight and take supplements for six months.

What was different with this study is that they used SPECT to be able to make treatment decisions based on biological evidence as opposed to basing treatment decisions on symptoms.

At the end of the six months, 69% of the former players reported improved memory, 53% moods were better and nearly half showed improvement on cognitive function tests and information processing. These are major changes in how these players would be able to live their lives.

The supplements that they put the players on included:

Omega-3 fatty acids

High-potency multivitamin/mineral supplement

Ginkgo biloba

Vinpocetine

N-acetylcysteine

Alpha-lipoic acid

Phosphatidylserine

Huperzine A

Acetyl-L-carnitine

So…If you or someone you know has brain damage, see if you can find someone in your area that uses SPECT for diagnosis and evaluating treatments.
(Reported Bottom Line Health)

PTSD common in chronic migraine sufferers

May 7, 2008

PTSD common in chronic migraine sufferers

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is more common in people who suffer from chronic migraine headache than in those with episodic migraine headache, research suggests.

"Recent data suggest that PTSD may be more common in headache sufferers than in the general population," Dr. B. Lee Peterlin, of Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and colleagues note in the journal Headache.

They assessed the relative frequency of PTSD in 32 patients with episodic migraine and 28 with chronic migraine. People with chronic migraine typically have headaches on 15 or more days a month, while people with episodic migraine have fewer than 15 days of headache per month.

Peterlin and colleagues report that significantly more subjects with chronic migraine than with episodic migraine had a history of depression (54 percent versus 22 percent).

There was no significant difference in the percentage of subjects who reported at least one significant traumatic life event (78 percent of episodic migraine patients and 79 percent of chronic migraine patients). The groups did not differ in terms of the average number of traumatic life events reported.

However, the frequency of PTSD was significantly greater in the chronic migraine group than in the episodic group (43 percent versus 9.5 percent). This remained significant after adjusting for depression and other factors that might influence the results.

PTSD may be a risk factor for chronic migraine headache, Peterlin and colleagues conclude.

"As a previous study has suggested that PTSD treatment alone can positively influence chronic pain conditions and disability," they add, "one of the implications of this study is that there should be greater consideration for the evaluation of PTSD in chronic migraine patients, as well as for the use of cognitive/behavioral therapy (alone or in combination with drug therapy) in this subgroup of headache sufferers."

SOURCE: Headache, April 2008.