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Brain-zapping, not drugs, helped depression + Artery size & stroke risk + Pickles

#1
C C Offline
Shape, size of brain arteries may predict stroke risk, study says
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2021/10/...633354191/

INTRO: The size and shape of the blood vessels in your brain may help predict your risk of an often-fatal type of stroke, called an aneurysm, a new study finds. An aneurysm is a bulge in an artery wall.

"A subarachnoid hemorrhage is the most dangerous type of stroke and occurs when a brain aneurysm leaks or ruptures, causing bleeding into the brain, killing more than 50% of affected people," said Dr. Arjun Burlakoti, a University of South Australia neuroanatomist.

For the study, Burlakoti conducted imaging tests of 145 patients and found people with varying sized brain arteries have greater odds of an aneurysm... (MORE)


Drugs didn’t help her depression. Brain-zapping did
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/deep-bra...depression

EXCERPT: Sarah, a 36-year-old woman, has suffered from severe, unrelenting depression since childhood. “My daily life had become so restricted and impoverished by depression, that I felt tortured by each day I forced myself to resist the suicidal impulses that overtook me several times an hour,” she says. It’s estimated that up to 30 per cent of people who go through treatment for depression are considered treatment-resistant, which means that they’ve tried at least two different courses of drugs to treat their condition but found little or no improvement in symptoms. Sarah was one of these people.

Her despair led her to enrol in a trial being run at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), which was testing the use of deep brain stimulation to treat treatment-resistant depression. Today, the findings of that trial are reported in a new paper in the journal Nature Medicine.

Deep brain stimulation, or DBS, involves implanting a device which runs tiny pulses of electricity to parts of the brain. It was first developed for people with Parkinson’s disease to help control their tremors, with the FDA approving its use for the first time in 1997. Its success quickly bred excitement about its application to treat other neurological diseases, such as depression and OCD. So far, no trial has conclusively shown it to work. But the results of this study offer a glimmer of promise that it could do so. 

Previous attempts to apply DBS in treating depression have tended to target the same region of the brain in every patient, with the pulses being delivered at a constant rate. But no two brains are the same, which means that a one-size-fits all version of DBS might not be the best approach. Knowing this, the researchers at UCSF instead refined the technology to personalise it to a specific brain for the first time. This meant zapping that region of her brain that resulted in the most effective and long-lasting improvement. 

First, the researchers had to find Sarah’s sweet spot...

[...] One sticky ethical issue with DBS is whether putting a device in someone’s brain can lead to changes in their personality. But altering abnormal moods is the very goal of using DBS to treat a psychiatric disorder like depression, which complicates things even further, says Jonathan Pugh, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford whose work has explored the ethics of DBS. “It’s very difficult to try and single out what are potentially the ethically problematic personality changes, and what are the changes that we actually want to try and help these patients to achieve.”

[...] The researchers firmly emphasise that just because the treatment worked for Sarah it does not mean that it will work for all... (MORE missing details)


Here's what happened to this woman after she attempted the '1 Gallon Pickle Jar Challenge'
https://youtu.be/gF69voHU_ys

EXCERPT: . . . Immediately after finishing the whole gallon of pickles, BT felt bloated. She had seen some people get sick trying to eat it quickly, so doing it slower was absolutely the right thing to do. But about 20 minutes after her last sip of the juice, BT could feel her stomach rumble.

At first, it was just a just a little shake, but very quickly, it felt like her stomach was folding on itself as she clenched her body together as hard as she could, and ran to the bathroom. On the toilet now, BT felt like all her organs had liquefied and exited her body into the bowl.

As the hours passed, she felt almost every drop of water squeeze out of her body, as her stomach and her intestines kept shaking and quaking. In a world of hurt, she imagined her brain getting sucked out of her skull and flushed into the toilet as the trembling in her abdomen become more and more intense. After all this time, she had no urge to drink any water. Laying down now, BT could swear her skin was inside out. She could see herself kneeling on the floor while staring at the wall.

She couldn’t speak but she wished she could. As she replayed herself eating the pickles, she was there being laughed at and confused. It kept everyone watching pleasantly amused enough to stay. But as it starts to feel like an ice pick had been jammed into her head from the back, she becomes weak, and she calls for 911, as she’s brought to the emergency room where we are now.

At examination, BT told doctors something about pickles. It wasn’t coherent because she was slurring her words. They weren’t exactly sure what happened. But there’s several clues as to what could be happening because she smells like pickles, and a blood test reveals that she has Acute Hypernatremia.

Hyper meaning high. Natr referring to sodium or more formally natrium as indicated by its symbol on the periodic table of elements. And emia meaning presence in blood. High sodium presence in blood. Acute meaning that there were no underlying problems that are leading to this issue, aside from the 1 gallon of pickles inside her body at the moment, which brings us to the first clue.

Pickles are high in sodium. The one gallon that BT ate has at least 20 grams of sodium in just pickles alone, not counting the pickle juice that she drank. If the juice has the same sodium content as the small pickle juicer bottles...

Here's what happened to this woman after she attempted the '1 Gallon Pickle Jar Challenge'

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gF69voHU_ys
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#2
stryder Offline
@1 Gallon Pickle Jar Challenge

Kind of reminds me of something that happen a couple of weekends ago to myself. No I didn't do any weird challenge involving eating alot of food, what I actually did was cook meal that I'm use to cooking. One of the ingredients I used in the meal was Mangetout. The problem was I tend to add the mangetout pretty late in the cooking and I ate it in a semiraw state.

The Mangetout was grown in Africa, and it's known that changes to the global climate has meant legumes grown in such countries can actually have higher than normal level of lectins.

In any sense at the time I didn't consider this however I started to have serious pains, it felt like my lower back had been dislocated, I was getting pains from all lower organs and it lasted all day. I couldn't stand, I couldn't sit, I couldn't lay down. My stomach muscles had tightened while my organs swelled (Causing both the pain and the illusion that I'd disclocated my back)

There wasn't much I could do at the time, I didn't want to take painkillers due to concerns how that might further effect me so I ended up having to wait it out, however during that time period I started to do some homework. I worked out it was a lectin problem because of how previous famine stricken locations would have starving people suffering from bulbousness caused by high lectin concentration.

What happens in the food source with the lectins has problems being broken down by enzymes released from the Gall Bladder. If the enzymes can't directly breakdown the material (in this case lectins), it will start trying to breakdown material (Intestinal lining) around that material(lectins) to try to catalyse breaking it down. The lectins lead to the organs inflamation and the enzymes that had attempted to deal with the lectins would find their way back to the Gall bladder further irritating it.

At it's worst if felt as if my gall bladder, pancreas, liver and upper intestine were effected. Even the day after there was still some residual effect which I would assume was a small amount of damage sustained from eating the semiraw mangetout.

The problem was the meal I ate that day, I only had a bowl of and I ended up with enough food for a couple more days from it. So I risked eating the same food again.

While the risk existed I did consider certain points. First when the food was initially cooked (and the mangetout was semicooked) it was piping hot, while it cooled it would have continued to cook the mangetout. Reheating the food using a microwave meant that the lectins were likely aided in being broken down better.

Furthermore since my body had semirecovered by this point, it was likely that the enzymes had now developed to handle the foodsource better.

I was able to eat the rest of the food with no further effects like the one I initially had, so it ruled out that food was poisoned or contained some other substance.

All I can say from it though is I'll be extremely careful about legumes in the future be it mangetout, peas or beans to make sure that I don't suffer from high levels of lectins again as that wasn't just unpleasant, It would of likely had other people in the A&E.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
Brain shocking reminds me of early Simpsons electro-shock therapy episode.

She who consumes a gallon of pickles and juice will probably get so depressed, unless so depressed already, that brain shocking may be required.

Confucius say: Woman who inhale pickle and swallow need head check. Hmmm…about as nice as I could put it. Are regulators watching…those with dirty minds that is.lol
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