Nourishing Your Brain

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Nourishing Your Brain

Sep 09, 2002 09:39 PDT

 

 

4/16/01 • Nourishing Your Brain

 

NEWSWEEK April 23 issue

 

By Anne Underwood

 

It's no secret that the fats in fish and walnuts are good for your

heart. New

research suggests they may also ward off depression and mental

maladies

 

Psychiatrist Andrew Stoll has seen plenty of patients with bipolar

disorder,

but few more serious than a middle-aged man he calls " X. "

 

Patient X suffered

his first episode of mania in Rome, where he became so delusional

that

he

landed first in jail and then in a psychiatric ward.

 

PATIENT X ESCAPED AND was re-arrested, but by then the Italian

authorities had had enough. They bundled him onto a plane back to

Boston,

where he was taken to Stoll's office at Brigham and Women's

Hospital.

 

Stoll

tried all the usual medications.

But lithium alone didn't work, and Patient X

was unable to tolerate the side effects of strong antipsychotic

drugs.

That's when Stoll, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard,

turned to a more

unconventional remedy—he instructed Patient X to eat a quarter pound

of

salmon every day, while continuing to take his lithium. The

treatment

proved

a success.

 

Salmon?

 

As psychiatric regimens go, it may sound fishy. But in a new

book called " The Omega-3 Connection, " Stoll argues that fish oils—

with

their

high content of polyunsaturated, omega-3 fatty acids—may help a

range of

 

psychiatric disorders.

 

The brain is an astonishing 60 percent fat, and it

needs omega-3s to function properly. In the last century, however,

Americans

have drastically reduced their intake of these oils, as we moved to

diets

based on processed foods.

This deficit, scientists agree, has contributed to

an epidemic of heart disease.

Now a spate of cross-national studies has also

linked low fish consumption to high rates of major depression,

bipolar

disorder, postpartum depression and suicidal tendencies.

 

" Heart disease and

depression often go hand in hand, " says Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, the

National

 

Institutes of Health psychiatrist who conducted a number of these

surveys.

" Now we may know why. "

 

It is impossible to reduce the cause to a single

explanation—especially since omega-3s may function differently in

each

of these conditions.

 

For major depression, omega-3s appear to work in part by

making it easier for the receptors on brain cells to process

mood-related signals from neighboring neurons.

 

" Think of the receptor as a doorbell on a

house, " says Dr. Lauren Marengell of Baylor College of Medicine.

Omega-3s

provide the lubrication that frees up a stuck doorbell and allows it

to

respond to a messenger's touch. The same fats may combat bipolar

disorder (which involves mania as well as depression) by inhibiting

a

process called signal transduction, which occurs inside a brain cell

after a messenger has " rung the bell. "

 

In a normal brain, the process is orderly. But in a bipolar

patient, it's as if everyone in a house started running in different

directions at the sound of the buzzer—and not necessarily answering

the

door.

 

Omega-3s—like all the major medications used to treat bipolar

disorder—help

quiet this confusion.

 

If a woman is low on omega-3s to begin with, this depletion may set

the

stage for postpartum depression.

 

While omega-3s are important for everyone, an adequate supply is

especially critical for infants and mothers. Gestating and newborn

babies often deplete their moms of these fats in order to nourish

their

own brains.

 

If a woman is low on omega-3s to begin with, this depletion may set

the

stage

for postpartum depression.

 

A child takes in large amounts of these fats

during the third trimester of gestation, and breast milk maintains a

steady

supply following birth.

Infant formulas, by contrast, deliver very little.

 

(The World Health Organization recommends supplementing formulas

with

omega-3s, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not yet

approved

 

supplementation.

The matter is under review.)

 

No one doubts that omega-3 fatty acids help build and maintain brain

tissue.

But can the same fats help treat psychiatric disorders? Researchers

have not conducted the large clinical trials needed to answer that

question, but the early evidence is encouraging. When Stoll

supplemented

the medications of 30 bipolar patients with either 10 grams of omega-

3s

or a placebo, those getting the fish oil did so much better that he

switched the controls over to fish oil just four months into a

nine-month trial.

British

doctors have also gotten impressive results in trials for depression

and

schizophrenia. Other researchers, however, have found negative or

neutral results in pilot studies, so it's not yet possible to deem

fish

oil an effective therapy. " The field is still in its infancy, "

cautions

Hibbeln.

 

 

" What we have now are provocative hypotheses, not a lot of hard-

nosed

data. "

Fortunately, because omega-3s are a normal part of the diet, they

have

caused virtually no side effects in the trials. " Omega-3s just give

back

to the body what it requires for proper functioning, " says Stoll.

 

 

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