How Brain Inflammation Can Influence Bipolar Disorder | CLIP | Vital Signs

When you're younger, they can potentially keep up with the bipolar energy. But the human body wasn't designed for bipolar. When things break down in the brain, what happens is you get oxidation. And then the oxidation creates your inflammation. And your thoughts just go on this rapid cycle. And they call it rapid cycling. Has been taken to a psychiatric hospital after being discovered disoriented and disheveled. Spotted on a ferry and is believed to be in hiding in France. Last October, Dreyfus wrecked his car in Beverly Hill. And if faulty brain chemistry is the cause, what ways can it be balanced to bring relief? If you restore their mitochondrial function, if you can restore that membrane structure, okay, that reduces the inflammation. When their brain starts getting back into control, they start looking outward to the world around them. Welcome to Vital Signs, Life After Crash Part 2. Taking a kaleidoscopic look at bipolar disorder. I'm Brendan Falun. Today, we're joined by Dr. Dane Goodenow, who has built diagnostic prevention and treatment systems across a range of diseases, as we've previously covered on Vital Signs. Links to his research into bipolar and other mental health disorders are in the description below. Now we pick up where we left off in Part 1, exploring the scope for targeted nutrients to relieve bipolar symptoms. So for instance, their B12 levels are injected. And so they go through vitamins faster than a normal person goes through vitamins because they're working harder. And so the nutrient capability or the nutrient requirement for a bipolar patient is higher than that of a natural normal person. So this white matter connectivity of the brain, it's kind of this core structural integrity of the body. Technically speaking, it's white matter microstructure gets impaired in bipolar disease. And it gets impaired because of the overactivity. Okay, so... It's turning over faster. It's getting worn down faster. And so... Exactly. And it's getting torn down faster than it can replace itself. And when you're younger, they can potentially keep up with the bipolar energy. So the bipolar brain is fundamentally an overactive brain. It's a brain that's already primed. And so any little additional stimuli turns it on even faster. Okay. And so like my previous analogy when I was talking about it's like a car, it's in one gear down running at high RPMs. Well, that creates load, creates heat, creates extra wear and tear. And if the body is not able to maintain and sustain the high demand level, then things start breaking down. When things break down in the brain, what happens is you get oxidation. And then the oxidation creates your inflammation. So your microglia, for example, when people talk about the immune system of the brain kicks in. And what these immune cells in the brain are called are called microglia. And these microglia then become attracted to this oxidized membrane. And that's your body's natural way of dealing with inflammation. But the inflammation that's being caused is not going away because it's a continual process, because the brain's still overactive. And so your inflammatory systems of the human body, both in the brain and the periphery, aren't meant to be on all the time. They're meant to come do a job, finish cleaning up some garbage, and then go away. And that's how it's supposed to work. So you have an insult, you have something bad happens, and it creates an inflammatory trigger. The inflammation comes in, deals with it. It's an acute system, it should go away. That's what it's designed for. But if the cause of that inflammation signal is constant, then the inflammation never goes away. So the inflammation, the inflammatory microglia are there, but they never go away because every time it cleans up a little bit of mess, there's another mess just around the corner to keep working on. And then eventually the microglia itself, that inflammatory, is also stressful. So it kind of creates its own inflammation. Autistic children, for example, an autistic person in their 40s and 50s, they'll have the same level of inflammation in their brain that they had when they're eight years old, when they're first diagnosed. The inflammation is in their brain their entire life. It never goes away. They just learn how to deal with it, or they try to find a way around it. And they try to find some mechanism to live with it, right? But it doesn't actually go away. And this is where some people have to realize we can manage symptoms without fixing the underlying cause. Perhaps someone close to you, or even you yourself, are living with bipolar disorder. If so, please feel free to share your experience here. What's the worst part of it? Is there a good side to it? Has any treatment been helpful? You can go to epochtv.com and find Vital Signs in the talk shows tab to leave your comments. Also, to get notice of new Vital Signs videos, follow me at VitalSignsBrendan on Instagram and see Vital Signs on X. Thinking back on the tightly wound vivacity that Richard Dreyfus brought to JAWS, it's not all that surprising to find that bipolar mania factored in. A circumstance that doesn't go unacknowledged by Dreyfus. He credits bipolar with helping propel his acting career and with branding his talent from an early age. He spoke about this with chief of staff of the Meninger Clinic a number of years back. When I found my passion, which was theatre and acting, I blew everyone off the table so that, and I also knew, and this was known to me as a part of an illness, I was absolutely certain, 100% certain of my success when I was nine years old. After the mammoth success of his second Steven Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he went on to win an Oscar for Best Actor in The Goodbye Girl. It isn't hard to imagine the kind of rollercoaster ride of ego intoxication that would have come with this success, followed by the anticlimactic brick wall impact of realizing that success isn't quite all it's cracked up to be. Richard has said he preferred proving his talent as a young actor rather than having everyone expect that of him after his 1977 Oscar win. Perhaps disillusionment fueled Richard's drug, alcohol, and other wild excesses in the years that followed. This led to a near-fatal car crash in 1982 that had life-changing consequences. In a short while, we'll look at where Richard Dreyfus sits with Bipolar Now and what happened following his crash. But first, we'll hear from Dr. Gudunow about using targeted nutrition to treat bipolar. The core things with bipolar is that since it is overheating, they require higher levels of nutrition. They need the B vitamins. They're B12, methylfolate, betaine. Okay, they need those things. They need the antacetylcysteines, the things that maintain their glutathione levels. Like these are things are very simple we've been using for years and years. That's related to the energy production in the cell? Yeah, so we need to be able to keep the engine cool. If you're going to run a car at 5,000 RPMs at 200 miles an hour, well, that's going to generate a lot of heat. And I'm going to need a radiator that can sustain that. I'm going to need brake pads that can sustain that load. Okay, but the human body wasn't designed for bipolar. Okay, we're not all bipolar, right? So that's a small percentage of the population. So as our adaptation and development has not been designed for that load on it. And so, but it can last for a certain period of time, but it can't last forever. And so we need to now look at that and say, okay, how can you restore the steering? How can you restore the braking? We need to support the health of the bipolar patient. And specifically in those areas that we know are being overactive and being burnt out. And so that we can start returning the control of their brain back to them. So plasmalogens are a critical component. So the omega-9 plasmalogens for calming the brain. And it actually directly attenuates this overactivity sequence. And also reduces the inflammation of the brain.