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Brain Connection To Hypertension?
The possibility that one cause of high blood pressure lies within the brain, and not the heart or blood vessels, has been put forward by scientists at the University of Bristol, UK. A research group there found a novel role for a protein called JAM-1, located in the walls of blood vessels in the brain. JAM-1 traps white blood cells, which can then cause inflammation and may obstruct blood flow, resulting in poor oxygen supply to the brain. The article notes that the idea that hypertension is an inflammatory vascular disease of the brain is somewhat controversial.
I love my damn salt.
FTFA: Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, commented: "This exciting study is important because it suggests there are unexpected causes of high blood pressure related to blood supply to the brain. It therefore opens up the possibility of new ways to treat this common, but often poorly managed, condition."
As there is still poor understanding about what changes occur in people when hypertension develops, the finding of JAM-1 is of great interest and opens up multiple new avenues for further research and potential treatment. How is this controversial?
What would the benefit of trapping white blood cells be? TFA refers to the discovery of a 'novel' role for the protein...
Is it possible that this is unintended behavior on the part of the protein or does the behavior serve some purpose?
from the under-pressure dept.
.. COMING DOWN ON ME
UNDER PRESSURE
under pressure dum dum dum dum dum dum
(Vanilla Ice totally ripped that song, but its so funny to watch a burnout try to explain it)
Not too long ago a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori was a similarly 'radical' concept. We know how that ended up changing things with regard to the treatment of ulcers.
What I'm interested in is if there's a link with migraines. Hypertension medication is quite often helpfull in preventing or modulating migraine attacks in severe sufferers. The underlying mechanisms of migraines are not fully known and what mechanisms are known, are poorly understood. There seems to be concensus that it involves a chemical inflamation proces of arteries in the skull, though and if this proposition holds, that might explain how these medications work for migraines, too.
Karma? What's that again?
aspirin is an anti-inflamatory...
Further research has shown that if you remove a person's brain entirely, his blood pressure drops to zero!! This is clearly conclusive evidence that the main cause of blood pressure is the brain.
Are these the same scientists that tell me milk can give me Cancer and that Eggs are bad for me one week, yet good for me another?
(Rhetorical question, FYI)
ilovegeorgebush
We all know stressed-out types get hypertension and not too many easy going, yoga types do. All this does is explain the exact chemistry by which some of us are ruining our bodies.
The article is carefull to state that this could be one of several factors.
Consider this, my brother-in-law was a mellow dude who did scientific work outdoors in beautiful national parks. He ate healthily and got regular excercise as part of his workday. He had bad hypertension.
Or an evolutionist...
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
maybe there's a reason for it. When the bombs fall, the fat people will inherit the earth. I don't think correcting what we don't like is always the most insightful thing to do. If nature didn't want 1 in 10 people with hypertension, she would have killed their asses by now.
You're right, they weren't trying to sell pharmaceuticals, were they?o americanhealth.com/order.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20051230013018/www.eur
The "pH imbalance" theory to everything health-related bullshit is still spewed on late-night infomercials. The fact it has been roundly debunked by medical science won't mean a thing to a faithful devote of the Church of Simple Answers and Vast Conspiracies like yourself, so I won't waste any more of my breath.
Aspirin also stops platelets, thus preventing blood clot to form and obstruction of arteries.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well the protein is called Jam-1, of course it's clogging arteries with a name like that!
The notion that a problem in the brain can cause hypertension is no news to me. My mother was hypOtensive her whole life, so much so that when I was a kid I remember her randomly passing out. A blood pressure reading of 80 over 40 was high for her all her life.
In her early 60s, she tripped, hit her head on a brick, and got a concussion. Immediately, her BP shot up to, say, 200 over 150. It stayed there for years. Now that she's in her 70s, it's finally gotten down to a "slightly high of normal" range.
The doc at the time told us she had damaged the part of the brain that controls blood pressure. Was he just trying to sound authoritative or has it been common knowledge for a long time that brain functions can cause hypertension? My impression was the latter. I'd be surprised if I was wrong.
This article suggests that the underlying principle underlying both, is the same (clogging of arteries). Which for me as a med-student is pretty damn cool to read, since the hypertension-CVA connection is pretty poorly understood.
P.S. Artherosclerosis is caused by white bloodcells being absorbed into the blood wall and consequently absorbing cholesterol (thereby getting trapped). So it's actually very similar.
I do love "!" but not as much as I love "..."...
I found about my hypertension when I was 18 (now 26). It's a disease present in my family (both my father and his father have/had it). I can say it certainly has some connection with brain activity. From experience, when focusing on something I can feel my blood pressure skyrocketing (with aching in rear part of head where some blood vessels are). I even managed to control it over years - by means of often relaxation periods and not having thinking bursts for long periods (makes me slower though :) - and it automagically tends to keep my blood pressure at lower levels.
It makes sense that brain increases blood pressure when there isn't much oxagen. Well, cardiologists even send people to ultrasonic imaging of neck artheries as this can cause problems hypertension, it is plausible that some other problem can cause same thing. Brain uses lots of oxygen, so it probably has highest influence on how much blood pressure is affected.
If they can find a treatment for this inflammation (is it auto-immune disease?), it might increase quality of life of a huge proportion of world's population, including myself. Current medicines aren't really effective: body tends to adapt to them and they screw up methabolism a bit.
So would gingko biloba lower blood pressure? It's well-known to increase blood flow to the brain. There's doubt that this does anything, as has been claimed, to improve memory. But due to the extensive marketing based on that claim it's widely available, cheap, comes in standardized doses.... Since blood-pressure gauges are also widely available and cheap, it would be fairly simple for even an undergrad to set up a good double-blind study and, if the results pan out, write up a nice little popular book that all the supplement shops would carry, and you nearly have a career.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I got diagnosed with hypertension about four years ago. Went to the ER -my first DR visit of _any_ type in 17 years- because I had a huge subcutaneous boil on a testicle. I didn't know it was a boil at the time of course.
You can laugh all you want. It hurt like hell. And more. And even trying to tell a nurse or doc what the hell was wrong was painful. It sounds obscene. But it also hurts worse so there's a point where you don't give a damn what it sounds like, you just want it fixed.
In the process of checking that out, they told me my BP was 300 over 160, which apparently means I should have been dead. I was also told I had type 2 diabetes. The sugar level was 250, I think. My cholesterol was bad too. It was a very fun day.
Anyway, I got put on antibiotics, anti-hypertensives, a couple different diabetic medications, and so on and so forth. The infection went away, the BP has dropped down -it was 130 over 74 this morning- and my sugar is now around 100-120 usually.
I have since learned I can sort of meditate and drop my BP by 15 or 20 points. It comes in handy at DR visits which are full of that "white coat effect" problem. It works better than the diuretic I take, which has mostly stopped working now after three years. My kidneys have adjusted. It no longer has any effect on me.
I am not sure there's a point to this post.
My health problems are all tied to lifestyle. The doctors keep after me to lose weight, exercise, bring numbers down so I will be healthier and live longer. But my life sucks and I fucking hate it and it's never going to improve -pushing 40 now never having gone on a date much less gotten laid, no education, nothing to look forward to, and I don't WANT to live an extra minute of it. So I have no incentive to do anything to improve my health.
Um... are we talking about the same Cayce who predicted (while channeling in trance) that in 1958 the US would discover the Death Ray that was used in Atlantis? The same one who said that China would be converted to Christianity by 1968? The same one who prescribed "bedbug juice" for heart failure, "fumes of apple brandy from a charred keg" for tuberculosis, and "the raw side of a freshly skinned rabbit, still warm with blood, fur side out, placed on the breast" for breast cancer.
Thanks, but I'll take a PPI for my ulcer and if I ever got breast cancer, I gotta say I'd go with Paclitaxel over bleeding bunny fur any day. The brandy thing... well maybe if I could drink it and not just inhale.
This is news for nerds, dude. Not for nuts.
Well that would probaply have been a verry intresting read, but i was mistaken....
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
I must disagree. My mom has had a variety of ailments over the years (lost an eye as a kid and has had to fight various resulting problems; lots of other things) and low blood pressure has always been one of them. She has had a BP cuff and regularly used it and recorded her readings for decades. Before he died, my dad took the readings. After his death, I did. Ever since automated cuffs became available she has had one and used it regularly. Her visits to the doctor always included a BP reading and those visits happened no less often that twice a year (I'd guess an average of once a quarter would be about right) since she was about 40. We have solid records of her BP for decades prior to the injury; any age-related change, however gradual, would have been noted long before the injury.
The facts as I know them are not in dispute. She had very low blood pressure. She got a concussion. Instantly, she had extremely high blood pressure. (And I mean that "instantly" quite literally. She had high BP at the ER that was dismissed because she had just been through something traumatic, but her BP stayed up the next day and the pattern was set.) The change to a high BP lasted a couple of years before it started to trend down. (Interestingly to me, NONE of the drug therapies her doctors tried for the next couple of years did squat. Whatever mechanism was causing her BP to be high simply was not addressed by the drugs then available and, frankly, I think they tried every pharmaceutical under the sun.) Granted, correlation is not causation, but in this case it's the only explanation for the sudden change.
It was a bit harder to find the rabbit recommendation, as cayce didn't actually say anything about the "the raw side of a freshly skinned rabbit". But here are a few quotes from readings I did find:In this case, the rabbit skin was used like a bandage, it seems. You have other options today, 80 years after this reading was given.Again, the rabbit fur seems to be used as a bandage, after the massaging of the Iodex preparation. The rabbit fur is not the treatment itself. YHBT again.
(like searching to find the single document that included all of my references about Cayce's head being up his ass)
Googling "bedbug juice" for heart failure turns up three documents.
HAND.
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