Patient attention

 I like Newton’s concept of patient attention:

"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent." 

~Isaac Newton

Weeks 3 & 4

I’ve been surrounding myself in everything telomeres. Here’s a quick update on the research front:

• There is a promising grant that seems to fit with our research goals. Writing a draft of this grant is my main project for the next week. I’m learning that the most important part of designing a study is identifying the AIMS. As is true for many things, the key is having a clear vision and setting specific goals. 
• I went to a research meeting with budding physician-epidemiologists where someone was presenting their R01 proposal. The group ripped it apart. It was discouraging, to say the least, and I came out of there questioning whether research is for me. Spending months investing in and developing your project, only to have it rejected. You need thick skin and perseverance in the face of unavoidable criticism. 
• I’m beginning to really understand how hard it is to design a high quality, rigorous, scientific study. No study is perfect and there will always be critical reviewers. The western medicine framework seems inadequate to study many of the questions I’m interested in. Many people in primary care offices in America would never be eligible for randomized controlled trials. People are complicated and real life isn’t randomizable.

The value of yawning

I was unaware of the value of yawning until now! This article is written by Dr. Andrew Newberg, a physician/researcher at Penn who I have admired after reading about his studies on the brain during meditation (he’s also featured in the movie “What the bleep do we know.”)

If you read the article, you’ll see how he talks about how both yawning and yogic breathing stimulate the precuneus in the parietal lobe. The precuneus apparently plays “a central role in consciousness, self-reflection, and memory retrieval,” which helps explain why yoga/meditation can help increase self-awareness. Yawning also improves alertness: “It quickly brings you into a heightened state of cognitive awareness… it rids the brain of sleepiness, thus helping you stay focused on important concepts and ideas.”

And yawning has a social function as well. Dr. Newberg explains how “Yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy.” Yawning is only “neurologically contagious” among humans, great apes, macaque monkeys, and chimpanzees! 

Heat your body once per day

I did a little experiment on myself  and found that my body temperature rises about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during my morning practice (today it went from 97.7 before practice --> 99.6 in the middle, though I haven’t been able to measure it at my peak so it may rise even more than that). This isn’t really surprising, as it’s already known that exercise increases core body temperature (and your body compensates by sweating to protect you from getting heat stroke), but I like seeing actual proof of my temperature elevation.

Pattabhi Jois said to heat your body only once per day. This is based on thousands of years of yogic study and observation. I wonder what measurable effects this has on the body -- Does it alter immune function? Does it alter our levels of inflammation? Does it reverse oxidative damage in cells? Does it help maintain telomere length? We know that exercisers have longer telomeres compared with non-exercisers, but we don’t know exactly how this happens. I wonder if it could be related to the frequent rise in core body temperature and the physiologic effects this has on cells.

The cause of over half of our greenhouse gas emissions

In case the animal cruelty and health factors aren’t enough:

**Meat consumption causes more than half of our greenhouse gas emissions**

Intense exercise keeps us molecularly young

I was excited to see this article on the study that’s about to come out in the Dec. 15 issue of Circulation.

The study compared telomere length in runners versus non-runners, finding that runners have cells with longer telomeres. Longer telomeres mean molecular youthfulness because as cells age, our telomeres (the DNA at the ends of our chromosomes) get shorter. The theory is that if we can stop this telomere shortening, we can slow down the aging process. They showed that professional athletes who run ~50 miles/week have telomeres the length of non-exercisers who are 10 years younger!

I can’t wait to see the paper when it comes out. I’m also curious about people who don’t currently exercise -- if they change their lifestyle and start exercising, what happens to their telomeres then? I wonder what length of time and type of exercise is needed to start seeing molecular changes.

Exercise remodels our brains

Here’s one explanation for why exercise works for mood/anxiety: it remodels our brains to better react to stressful situations.

A study came out comparing rats that exercised (allowed to run) versus rats not allowed to exercise. The rats that exercised grew new neurons in their brains, which scientists called “cells born from running.” These new neurons behaved differently -- while other cells expressed “stress genes” during stressful situations, these new cells remained “biochemically, molecularly, calm.”

Previously, the mechanism by which exercise helps with mood and anxiety has been unclear. This study helps explain that exercise actually “remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress.” Though the rats exercised for only 6 weeks, it’s not clear how long or how intensely humans need to exercise for this remodeling process to start.