Healthy Living
The Fundamental Things Apply, as Rabbits Go By Written by Brian W. Donnelly, MD – AHN Pediatrics Wexford
In “The Rabbit Effect : Live Longer, Happier, and Healthier with the Groundbreaking Science of Happiness,” Dr. Kelli Harding takes us along on her path of discovering the keys to better health. Following her rabbit meant exploring the interactions between mental and physical health. In New Zealand, a group of white male rabbits was fed a high fat diet. It had been established that these rabbits developed heart disease much like humans if they were fed the lagomorphic equivalent of ‘junk’ food. After several months, all the rabbits had the expected elevations in cholesterol, blood pressure and heart rate. But, surprisingly, one subgroup did NOT have the pathologic changes in their blood vessels that the other bunnies had. The researchers scoured the testing model for a plausible explanation. What they discovered was that the rabbits whose blood vessels had not changed for the worse were taken care of during the study by someone who petted them, who talked to them, and who nurtured them. The investigators had not controlled for the ‘tender loving care’ factor.
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This unexpected finding intrigued the author and ultimately affected the direction of her career. In varied clinical settings during her training, she was compelled to wonder why some patients did much better than others in almost identical circumstances. She looked for other evidence of how that TLC could impact health. Her search led her to the work of Dr. Hans Selye. Dr. Selye was an endocrinologist who studied the effects of stress on rats. He described the General Adaptation Syndrome, which was experienced by all of the subjects in his stress experiments. The alarm stage is first, where the body identifies a stimulus as stressful. The body activates the adrenergic or “fight or flight” hormones and the brain’s vigilance is heightened. Ordinarily, the stress would be short-lived, and the body could relax afterward. But with prolonged stress, the Resistance stage follows, where the body stays activated at a higher than normal level. Unrelenting stress causes distress, which causes triggers internal harm. Because the body cannot maintain this state indefinitely, the final stage is Exhaustion. Distressed humans seem to follow the same pattern. For us, the observable results of this last stage include heart disease, diabetes mellitus, digestive ailments, asthma, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease. Another scientific finding that emerged to help explain the TLC effect involved telomeres. Telomeres are repetitive nucleotide sequences at the ends of our chromosomes. They can be thought of as protective caps at each end of our DNA strands. They are known to get shorter with age. In studies of twins, the one with the shorter telomeres was three times less likely to outlive the other. Briefly, the shorter the telomeres get, the shorter your life gets. Optimizing diet and exercise can reduce the rate of telomere shortening. The ingestion of anti-oxidants can also slow the process. Conversely, cigarette smoking and obesity have both been shown to increase the rate of telomere shortening. Exposure to certain pollutants and high levels of stress are also potent telomere shorteners.
AHN Pediatrics-Pediatric Alliance • Winter 2020/2021 • www.ahnpediatrics.org
