Cerebral Diabetes and the Reversal of the Flynn Effect; What is it, what causes it, what is the impact, and how do we combat it? By Mike McInnes
Summary of what you would like to talk about:
Recently Professor Lovestone at Kings College, London identified 10 proteins that mark Alzheimer’s 15 years prior to diagnosis. Actually these proteins are markers for cerebral diabetes and they begin not 15 years prior to Alzheimer’s but from the modern foetus, and affect infants, children, teenagers, adults and the elderly – this condition is sugar driven and nothing to do with ageing or genes – although enhanced by each of these.
A few paragraphs on your subject:
J Flynn a political scientist at Otago University NZ, found that IQ had risen globally throughout the 20th century – known as the Flynn Effect – Flynn is famous in cognitive science. More recently Scandinavian and Dutch scientists have found that the Flynn Effect is in reverse, but are unable to explain why this is so. The explanation is simple – refined sugars suppress the cerebral glucose pump – causing chronic cerebral glucose deprivation and cognitive impairments – and affects all ages of the population. The classic metabolic diseases – obesity/diabetes/heart disease are caused by the same mechanism but they appear many years or decades prior to the manifestation of the cognitive damage. This talk will explain the background and the potential for reversing this pathology.
The Amyloid Brain: Cerebral Diabetes
A brain and nervous system is simply an evolutionary device to maximise the energy supply into any living organism – to navigate, and find and secure food and energy resources, which may involve high order memory and cognitive strategies both to avoid predation and to outwit prey, but there is a contradiction inherent in this strategy – nerve tissue is highly costly in energy terms, and necessitates a surplus energy income beyond locomotion and the high cost of resting, reproduction, offspring rearing, and sleep. If an organism has a secure food/energy resource available to fund its cost of living, via its digestive system, without need of a nervous system, it would seem appropriate to reduce this cost, and some animals (the sea sprite) do so. Likewise in a situation of chronically reduced energy income, when locomotion and its dangers are also necessarily reduced, a survival strategy to reduce the cost of the nervous system would seem useful. Many animals and humans use the strategy of liquidating brain tissue, via production of amyloid proteins, when energy income drops. Cerebral diabetes (incipient dementia) is the expression in humans, in this case not due to lack of energy income, but to the suppression of the cerebral glucose pump, by excess sugar income, a form of short circuiting the brain.
A few paragraphs about you:
Mike McInnes is a retired pharmacist with a special interest in cerebral energy metabolism and its modern impairments
