A patient of mine pointed me to a show on KTCS that was on Alzheimer’s disease. While I could not watch the whole show, a very interesting segment involved little mice swimming in a big tub of cloudy water. The tub had aplatform hidden below the surface where the mice could swim to and then rest.
Mice do not like swimming, so once they find the platform they tend to remember where it is, and swim in an almost straight line to it when put back in the pool.
The group of researches had the mice learn the route to the platform, and then gave them a protein that destroys nerve tissue. All the mice “forgot” the route to the platform when they were placed in the tub again, and ended up swimming in circles before getting to their platform.
Here’s the interesting part: the mice then took a “vacation” where they were placed in a stimulating environment with exercise wheels, toys, and other mice to socialize with.
When these vacationed mice were returned to the cloudy pool, they remembered the route and swam directly to the platform for refuge. It is almost as if the “vacation” with exercise, toys, and social stimulation re-opened old memories.
An interesting theory behind this is that the “vacation” was able to induce a chemical change to the proteins that DNA are wound upon.
If the DNA is tightly wound, less “reading” of the DNA occurs, and less proteins are thus produced, including ones associated with accessing memories. A process called acetylation and methylation controls how tightly the DNA is wound. This process is also controlled by the stress hormones and hormones produced by the adrenal glands.
In chronic stress, I often find my patient’s need adrenal support. Their adrenal hormones may test low, or they may show evidence of being under oxidative stress. Furthermore, any stress, physical or emotional, can deplete the antioxidant enzyme glutathione, and thus dependency on the nutrient NAC (n-acetyl cysteine) increases., causing a mild deficiency. Incorrectly balanced stress hormones or a deficiency of NAC (the precursor for acetylation) can lead to difficulty reading DNA, manifesting as memory problems.
Conversely, having correctly balanced adrenal hormones (using herbs or nutrients) and having a good adaptation to oxidative stress (using nutrients or exercise/ozone), may improve memory.
Other studies done in mice actually showed that exercise was able to increase the weight of nerve cells in the brain, with concominant improvements in memory (they used the same swimming test to test this). The increased weight may have been from increased connections between cells or even increases in the cells themselves.
And of course, fighting stress with plenty of mental stimulation, exercise, and social stimulation may help to preserve or even unlock memories. The vacations worked for mice.
