SHIFT HAPPENS

SHIFT HAPPENS ANDREA WAGEMAKER

Shining Light

ON ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

There are currently no effective therapies for

Alzheimer's disease. As lifespans increase and our population ages, Alzheimer's represents a looming public health problem of immense proportions, one that is also personal. One in three adults will die from Alzheimer's, or age-related dementia, touching almost everyone as a patient or a caregiver. The total societal costs associated with dementia will reach $2 trillion by 2030, greater than cancer and heart disease.

Inside the human brain are billions of different neurons. The junctions between different neurons are called synapses. Electrical signals fire through the brain synapses, bringing millions of neurons into synchrony in cycles, or waves. These are known as brainwaves. The speed and amplitude of these brainwaves are linked to certain states of consciousness, which are classified into five distinct categories. These brainwave frequencies range from delta waves (.5-3hz) to gamma waves (25-100+hz). Your synapses actually fire in all of these different frequency waves simultaneously, however one frequency at a time is usually dominant. Each person’s brainwave signatures (combinations of waves including amplitude of each brainwave) are unique.

Recent studies suggest that Alzheimer's disease disrupts brain signaling and how neurons synchronize. This specific type of neuron synchrony altered in Alzheimer's disease is called the gamma rhythm. Sensory information from our environment is critical to how the brain

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synchronizes and communicates which aids in our ability to remember loved one’s names, recall what we did last week, and to pay attention to where we put our car keys. Altered gamma rhythms in Alzheimer's disease are due in part to the toxic accumulation of a snipped protein called amyloid beta, resulting in fewer neurons firing in synchrony.

Research from the lab of Director Li-Huei Tsai of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT has sought to understand how Alzheimer's disease affects gamma rhythms in the brain, under the premise that abnormal neuronal firing populations play a key role in the symptoms of the disease.

To create an effective treatment in humans with Alzheimer's disease, it's ideal to invent a non-invasive technique. To this end, Li-Huei Tsai and her team created a sensory paradigm that uses flickering light to restore the gamma rhythm and to reduce the levels of amyloid beta.

5XFAD Alzheimer's mice were exposed to 40 Hertz flickering light, which caused enhanced gamma rhythm neuronal activity and reduced amyloid beta levels by over 50% in the visual cortex. In addition, the 40 Hertz flickering light treatment caused microglia in Alzheimer's mice to become more active and dramatically increase in size by engulfing amyloid beta. When the gamma flickering light treatment was used in older Alzheimer's mice with toxic levels of amyloid beta, which results in aggregates called plaques, the plaques decreased. However, for the plaque levels to remain low, the flickering light treatment had to be given over several days versus hours.

As Alzheimer’s is considered an irreversible and progressive brain disorder, this study represents very exciting research. Whether this will work on humans as effectively as mice remains to be seen. As Dr. Tsai herself commented as the main result of the study, in March 2021, the “findings uncover a previously unappreciated function of gamma rhythms in recruiting both neuronal and glial responses to attenuate Alzheimer’s-disease-associated pathology.” Also exciting though is Dr. Tsai’s approach, which activates the brain back to normal functioning without drugs, so that it can heal itself.

This unique, non-invasive approach might lead to the development of treatments that can affect the disease without the current pharmacological challenges of the blood brain barrier, or unexpected drug interactions. This technique is a big step in finding new and effective treatments for Alzheimer's disease that may halt and reverse the symptoms of a disease that impacts so many of us.

You can visit Lucia Light right here in the Comox Valley and get into the light by calling Andrea at Shift Happens Lucia Light 250-338-3401.

Andrea Wagemaker at Shift Happens & Lucia Light in Courtenay • www.ShiftHypnotherapy.ca • 250-338-3401

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Remembering

SEPTEMBER 11

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Our television was huge back then, a monstrous

box. I remember pulling back the divider, shouting to my partner. On the computer, CNN’s website was reduced to a single white page of text, pictures and ads stripped away to withstand the crushing traffic. The headline read simply, AMERICA UNDER ATTACK.

I kept an appointment that week with my barber, a wonderful man who ran an immaculate salon in Vancouver. To call him a barber is a ridiculous understatement, and cutting my hair was probably the most boring part of his job. But he always welcomed me like a king.

Normally a fountain of conversation, my friend was so quiet that day. And as I looked in the mirror I considered for the first time his middle eastern name, and the cold new reality that was forming on our streets, even here, even in Canada. The drumbeat of recrimination and war.

We all knew it was madness to go into Afghanistan (and later Iraq). That’s what I have a hard time explaining to my kids, that we knew it from the very start. And as the allies marched to war on terror, we marched in peace protests that choked the city streets. And still the bombs fell.

It was a time of great loss, beginning with the slaughter of passengers, office workers, and first responders 20 years ago, and reverberating across the globe. It was a time of great suspicion, and fear, and rage.

But I remember the warm hand on my shoulder, the long scissors moving with the grace of a surgeon. I remember taking refuge in that moment, that simple act. Gathering my beliefs — still the beliefs of a young man, uncertain, malleable — that we are by nature a society of helpers. And that while violence makes the headlines and sears into our memories, it is tolerance that rebuilds.

Not the tolerance of appeasement, for that tolerance is both weak and afraid. The understanding instead of equals, built brick by brick from the ashes of our mistakes. Hard work, and harder still to commemorate. So I try to remember this, as we remember the lives of all those lost to hatred on that terrible day.

Lest we forget.

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