Endocannabinoid System Regulates Emotional Homeostasis, Study Says

Endocannabinoid System Regulates Emotional Homeostasis, Study Says
Share This Article

Madrid, Spain: Naturally occurring chemicals in the human body that mimic the effects of plant cannabinoids moderate human emotions and control anxiety, according to findings published in the Spanish scientific journal Revista de Neurologica.

Investigators at Complutense University in Madrid report that manipulating of the endocannabinoid system may one day be a course of treatment in the management of certain emotional disorders.

“[P]resent data reinforce the involvement of the endocannabinoid system in the control of emotional homeostasis and further suggest the pharmacological manipulation of the endocannabinoid system [is] a potential therapeutic tool in the management of anxiety-related disorders,” authors concluded.

Previous research on the endocannabinoid system indicates that endogenous cannabionoids moderate numerous biological functions, including appetite, blood pressure, reproduction, motor coordination, and bone mass.

For more information, please contact Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, at: paul@norml.org. Full text of the study, “Functional role of the endocannabinoid system in emotional homeostasis,” appears in the January issue of Revista de Neurologica.

51 PHARMACEUTICALS & OTHER COMPOUNDS FOUND IN DRINKING WATER

Rowan Harper, New Scientist – A comprehensive survey of the drinking water for more than 28 million Americans has detected the widespread but low-level presence of pharmaceuticals and hormonally active chemicals.

Little was known about people’s exposure to such compounds from drinking water, so Shane Snyder and colleagues at the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas screened tap water from 19 US water utilities for 51 different compounds. . . The 11 most frequently detected compounds – all found at extremely low concentrations – were:

– Atenolol, a beta-blocker used to treat cardiovascular disease

– Atrazine, an organic herbicide banned in the European Union, but still used in the US, which has been implicated in the decline of fish stocks and in changes in animal behavior

– Carbamazepine, a mood-stabilizing drug used to treat bipolar disorder, amongst other things

– Estrone, an estrogen hormone secreted by the ovaries and blamed for causing gender-bending changes in fish

– Gemfibrozil, an anti-cholesterol drug

– Meprobamate, a tranquilizer widely used in psychiatric treatment

– Naproxen, a painkiller and anti-inflammatory linked to increases in asthma incidence

– Phenytoin, an anticonvulsant that has been used to treat epilepsy

– Sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic used against the Streptococcus bacteria, which is responsible for tonsillitis and other diseases

– TCEP, a reducing agent used in molecular biology

– Trimethoprim, another antibiotic

The concentrations of pharmaceuticals in drinking water were millions of times lower than in a medical dose, and Snyder emphasizes that they pose no public health threat. He cautions, though, that “if a person has a unique health condition, or is concerned about particular contaminants in public water systems, I strongly recommend they consult their physician.”. . .

‘Alternative’ Medicine Is Mainstream

The evidence is mounting that diet and lifestyle are the best cures for our worst afflictions.

In mid-February, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the Bravewell Collaborative are convening a “Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public.” This is a watershed in the evolution of integrative medicine, a holistic approach to health care that uses the best of conventional and alternative therapies such as meditation, yoga, acupuncture and herbal remedies. Many of these therapies are now scientifically documented to be not only medically effective but also cost effective.

[Commentary] Martin Kozlowski

President-elect Barack Obama and former Sen. Tom Daschle (the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services) understand that if we want to make affordable health care available to the 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance, then we need to address the fundamental causes of health and illness, and provide incentives for healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing only drugs and surgery.

Heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer and obesity account for 75% of health-care costs, and yet these are largely preventable and even reversible by changing diet and lifestyle. As Mr. Obama states in his health plan, unveiled during his campaign: “This nation is facing a true epidemic of chronic disease. An increasing number of Americans are suffering and dying needlessly from diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma and HIV/AIDS, all of which can be delayed in onset if not prevented entirely.”

The latest scientific studies show that our bodies have a remarkable capacity to begin healing, and much more quickly than we had once realized, if we address the lifestyle factors that often cause these chronic diseases. These studies show that integrative medicine can make a powerful difference in our health and well-being, how quickly these changes may occur, and how dynamic these mechanisms can be.

Many people tend to think of breakthroughs in medicine as a new drug, laser or high-tech surgical procedure. They often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lifestyle — what we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke cigarettes, how much exercise we get, and the quality of our relationships and social support — can be as powerful as drugs and surgery. But they often are. And in many instances, they’re even more powerful.

These studies often used high-tech, state-of-the-art measures to prove the power of simple, low-tech, and low-cost interventions. Integrative medicine approaches such as plant-based diets, yoga, meditation and psychosocial support may stop or even reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, prostate cancer, obesity, hypercholesterolemia and other chronic conditions.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that these approaches may even change gene expression in hundreds of genes in only a few months. Genes associated with cancer, heart disease and inflammation were downregulated or “turned off” whereas protective genes were upregulated or “turned on.” A study published in The Lancet Oncology reported that these changes increase telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. Even drugs have not been shown to do this.

Our “health-care system” is primarily a disease-care system. Last year, $2.1 trillion was spent in the U.S. on medical care, or 16.5% of the gross national product. Of these trillions, 95 cents of every dollar was spent to treat disease after it had already occurred. At least 75% of these costs were spent on treating chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, that are preventable or even reversible.

The choices are especially clear in cardiology. In 2006, for example, according to data provided by the American Heart Association, 1.3 million coronary angioplasty procedures were performed at an average cost of $48,399 each, or more than $60 billion; and 448,000 coronary bypass operations were performed at a cost of $99,743 each, or more than $44 billion. In other words, Americans spent more than $100 billion in 2006 for these two procedures alone.

Despite these costs, a randomized controlled trial published in April 2007 in The New England Journal of Medicine found that angioplasties and stents do not prolong life or even prevent heart attacks in stable patients (i.e., 95% of those who receive them). Coronary bypass surgery prolongs life in less than 3% of patients who receive it. So, Medicare and other insurers and individuals pay billions for surgical procedures like angioplasty and bypass surgery that are usually dangerous, invasive, expensive and largely ineffective. Yet they pay very little — if any money at all — for integrative medicine approaches that have been proven to reverse and prevent most chronic diseases that account for at least 75% of health-care costs. The INTERHEART study, published in September 2004 in The Lancet, followed 30,000 men and women on six continents and found that changing lifestyle could prevent at least 90% of all heart disease.

COMMENTARY

That bears repeating: The disease that accounts for more premature deaths and costs Americans more than any other illness is almost completely preventable simply by changing diet and lifestyle. And the same lifestyle changes that can prevent or even reverse heart disease also help prevent or reverse many other chronic diseases as well. Chronic pain is one of the major sources of worker’s compensation claims costs, yet studies show that it is often susceptible to acupuncture and Qi Gong. Herbs usually have far fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals.

Joy, pleasure and freedom are sustainable, deprivation and austerity are not. When you eat a healthier diet, quit smoking, exercise, meditate and have more love in your life, then your brain receives more blood and oxygen, so you think more clearly, have more energy, need less sleep. Your brain may grow so many new neurons that it could get measurably bigger in only a few months. Your face gets more blood flow, so your skin glows more and wrinkles less. Your heart gets more blood flow, so you have more stamina and can even begin to reverse heart disease. Your sexual organs receive more blood flow, so you may become more potent — similar to the way that circulation-increasing drugs like Viagra work. For many people, these are choices worth making — not just to live longer, but also to live better.

It’s time to move past the debate of alternative medicine versus traditional medicine, and to focus on what works, what doesn’t, for whom, and under which circumstances. It will take serious government funding to find out, but these findings may help reduce costs and increase health.

Integrative medicine approaches bring together those in red states and blue states, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, because these are human issues. They are both medically effective and, important in our current economic climate, cost effective. These approaches emphasize both personal responsibility and the opportunity to make affordable, quality health care available to those who most need it. Mr. Obama should make them an integral part of his health plan as soon as possible.

Dr. Chopra, the author of more than 50 books on the mind, body and spirit, is guest faculty at Beth Israel Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ornish is clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Mr. Roy is professor emeritus of materials science at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Weil is director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.

DIAGNOSIS ON GUPTA NOT GOOD

Brian Clark, Daily Green – Gupta is a skilled surgeon who even distinguished himself saving lives in Iraq, while embedded with a Navy unit. But not everyone is bully on the choice. A number of people, including prominent New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, are uncomfortable with the fact that Gupta harshly criticized Michael Moore for his muckraking Sicko, when most observers believe Moore’s work holds up better than the “fudging” Gupta accused him of.

For his part, pundit Keith Olbermann had this quip about the possible nomination: “Isn’t this like making Judge Judy the Attorney General?” Olbermann argued that Gupta is “transparently TV,” and wonders if the media connection is an evolution of the Surgeon General’s role. Others have wondered if Gupta has enough public health experience.

Gupta once told Wolf Blizter, “We spend so much of our health care budget towards taking care of people after they’ve already become sick, instead of preventing some of those diseases in the first place. Medically and morally, it makes a lot of sense to keep people from getting sick in the first place, and I think that has got to be a big component of fixing the health care system overall.”

That’s a very commendable position, and one we at TDG absolutely support. However, we question whether Dr. Gupta’s record — while including many examples of commendable journalism — really lives up to such ideals on balance. Now, we take a look back at Gupta’s most disturbing positions:

– Chris Mooney blasted Gupta in Columbia Journalism Review for giving wide-eyed coverage of the Raelian cult’s highly dubious claims of having cloned a human being back in 2002. Mooney faults Gupta for saying the Raelian-connected Clonaid group had “the capacity to clone,” and, “We are certainly going to be anxiously awaiting to see some of the proof from these independent scientists next week.” Despite the fact that Clonaid was providing no evidence of the purported “Eve” whatsoever, not even a photo.

– Despite the widespread evidence of harm from phthalates, Gupta soft pedals and downplays the risks:

“As we’ve been talking about, it’s really hard to quantify just how much of a risk these phthalates are. Most of the studies have been done on animals. There’s not human trials that actually show that they might be harmful, but a lot of people worried about it nonetheless.”

Actually, a number of human studies have shown harm. For example, a recent study conducted by the University of Rochester Medical Center and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that exposure to phthalates not only causes reproductive problems in men (as suggested by a previous study) but is also linked to abdominal obesity and insulin resistance in adult males.

Later, Gupta does concede: “So, you know, the likelihood of them being in combination possibly causing some detrimental effect is something that hasn’t been studied as well.”

– In a strange article for Time, Gupta criticized support of marijuana decriminalization for small possession, saying supporters of the law are just interested in getting stoned, not providing valuable medicine to those in pain. Gupta admits that marijuana can have benefits for some patients, but then he seems to fall on the favor of draconian control laws, instead of the rights of patients and doctors to best decide their own health care.

This is what he wrote: “But I’m here to tell you, as a doctor, that despite all the talk about the medical benefits of marijuana, smoking the stuff is not going to do your health any good.” But what about those in pain and with glaucoma, whom he just wrote could be helped?

– Counterpunch argues that Gupta oversold Merck’s Gardasil vaccine for young girls, starting back in 2006, before the FDA had approved the drug, but after the manufacturer had started a PR and marketing blitz, including targeting of journos. According to Counterpunch, the clinical trials of Gardasil never tested for preventing cervical cancer, despite the fact that Gupta hyped the product for that use. The site argues that Gupta failed to mention that medical experts warn that the jury is still out on what impact this vaccine might actually have on cervical cancer rates. (Gupta also did not disclose that Gardasil was not tested on young girls before being approved, who may respond differently than adult subjects).

– Then there’s Vioxx, Merck’s disgraced, canceled drug pulled off the market in 2004 after an increased risk of heart disease surfaced among users. There were thousands of lawsuits (settled for just under $5 billion), which faulted Merck for hiding dangers of the drug. But Gupta told Miles O’Brien on CNN’s “American Morning” on October 30, 2003:

“Miles O’Brien: Let’s talk about Vioxx. Some indication it might increase the risk of heart attack?

“Gupta: This stat has been around since August of 2001. They talked about the increase of heart attack with Vioxx. The numbers are very small. Perhaps a small percentage increase in the overall risk of heart attacks with Vioxx. They say 37 percent to 39 percent but that’s of a very small number. After 90 days, no increased risk.”

Bizarre words from Gupta, who later told reporters that he got that information from Merck, the drug’s maker.

Counterpunch points out that Gupta benefited from a lucrative “integrated marketing” arrangement, whereby his work with Accent Health (which makes TV programs for doctor waiting offices) received substantial support from Merck — something Gupta did not disclose in his reports.

– The most infamous report by Dr. Sanjay Gupta was his scathing attack of Sicko, in which he accused the filmmaker of “fudging” facts. However, a detailed review by Moore’s team pokes massive trauma-sized holes in the doctor’s attacks. For example, Gupta said Moore falsely claimed the U.S. spends $7,000 per person on healthcare — when the Bush administration’s own report from 2006 bore this out (Gupta based his charge on an outdated report, but did not disclose this to viewers). In contrast, Cuba spent $251 per person (not $25, as Gupta first claimed, then retracted), despite being ranked only two slots lower in overall coverage by the World Health Organization (something the movie points out, but which Gupta bizarrely implied Moore was trying to hide).

Gupta said Moore falsely claimed Cubans live longer than Americans, while the most current data available at that time demonstrated Sicko’s accuracy. The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report put U.S. life expectancy at 77.5 years, while Cuba’s was listed as 77.6 years by the United Nations Development Program in that year.

Gupta also featured Moore critic Paul Keckley, whom he identified as affiliated only with Vanderbilt University, when in actuality Keckely has deep ties to the insurance industry and private sector. The list of other factual problems with Gupta’s attack goes on and on. One would hope the Surgeon General would be more accurate on such an important issue. (To many viewers, the worst part of this wasn’t so much the quibbling over facts, but Gupta’s hostile, dismissive attitude, and his resorting to childish defense of the American system, which many Americans are very unhappy with — especially the 45 million or so with no insurance whatsoever.)

Fizzy drinks sold by Coca-Cola in Britain have been found to contain pesticides

Daily Mail, UK – Fizzy drinks sold by Coca-Cola in Britain have been found to contain pesticides at up to 300 times the level allowed in tap or bottled water. A worldwide study found pesticide levels in orange and lemon drinks sold under the Fanta brand, which is popular with children, were at their highest in the UK. . . The study uncovered pesticides in some fizzy drinks at up to 300 times the level permitted in tap water. . .

GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE

Reto U. Schneider is the author of The Mad Science Book. This is one of the experiments described

Reto U. Schneider, The Mad Science Book – The Good Friday service in Easter 1962 was a memorable experience for ten seminarians at the Andover Newton Theological School. Although they could remember hardly anything of the sermon delivered by Pastor Howard Thurman, they could recall a sea of colors, voices from the Beyond, and the feeling that they were melting into the surrounding world. In a word, the students were high.

At the beginning of the 1960s, some daring scientists turned their attention to studying mind-altering substances. This was the period when it was all part and parcel of a lecture on mysticism to ingest magic mushrooms to gain practical insight into the subject, and when a doctoral thesis could entail giving students drugs and observing their behaviour. This is exactly what Walter Pahnke did: this young theologian and doctor from Harvard University was keen to discover whether psychedelic drugs could induce the kind of mystical sensations that only very few people otherwise experience, for example when in a state of religious trance. Users of LSD, psilocybin or mescaline had long claimed that this was the case.

Pahnke turned to Timothy Leary, who a short time before had begun conducting drug experiments at Harvard, and who later became a leading figure in the 1960s counterculture. He proposed an experiment to Leary: test subjects would attend a church service, but half of them would be given mind-expanding drugs in advance. Afterwards, all participants would be required to fill in a questionnaire and be interviewed.  Comparing the findings with descriptions of mystical experiences from the realm of religion would demonstrate whether there was a qualitative difference between them.

[Leary] explained to Pahnke that a psychedelic trip was an intensely personal experience and that a person would have to have experienced several himself before he could even contemplate devising such an experiment. However, Pahnke was adamant that he would have to wait until his thesis had been accepted before he indulged. He didn’t want anyone accusing him of partiality: the experiment would only have a chance of succeeding if he hadn’t taken any drugs himself beforehand. . .

On the morning of Good Friday, two hours before the service, 20 students met in the crypt of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. They were encouraged “not try to fight the effects of the drug even if the experience became very unusual or frightening.”. . .

The service lasted two and a half hours. When it had ended, the students were interviewed for the first time. At 5 o’clock, Leary invited everyone to come and eat with him, but ‘the trippers were still too high to do much except shake their heads, saying “Wow!”‘, as he later recalled. . .

In the days following the experiment, and again six months later, the subjects were quizzed about what they had gone through. . . The results were unequivocal: eight of the 10 students who had eaten the magic mushroom experienced at least seven of the impressions and feelings customarily associated with a mystical experience. By contrast, no-one from the control group reached this kind of score. In every category, they lagged far behind the experimental group. . .

Twenty-five years after the experiment, the psychologist Rick Doblin attempted to find the surviving participants. In four years’ of detective work, he succeeded in tracking down 19 of the 20 students. Sixteen of them agreed to be interviewed and filled in the same questionnaire as in the original experiment. The results were astonishingly consistent: those in the experimental group and the control group gave much the same answers as they had done a quarter of a century before. The test subjects from the experimental group described the Good Friday service of 1962 as one of the high points in their spiritual lives. They all claimed that the experiment had had a positive influence on them. Some attributed their later socially aware outlook to it, while others said it had helped them come to a positive accommodation with their fear of death.

Nevertheless, most of the former participants also recalled that the experiment also had its negative aspects. There were moments when they thought they were going mad or dying. Pahnke only treated this aspect in passing in his thesis. In particular he hushed up the fact that one subject had to be injected with an antidote when the situation got out of hand: seized with an urge to put Pastor Thurman’s call to spread the word of Christ into action straight away, one student left the chapel and went out onto the street, from where he had to be fetched back. . .

Just one member of the control group claimed that the experiment had benefited him greatly. Not that it was the church service as such that had such a positive effect on him, but rather the decision he made during it to try psychedelic drugs himself at the next available opportunity.