Somatic Mechanic

Parkinson's Patients improve with "forced" exercise

The NYTimes has an interesting article discussing the findings of a Parkinson's Disease researcher.  

"Scientific discoveries can be serendipitous, and so it was when Jay L. Alberts, then a Parkinson’s disease researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, mounted a tandem bike with Cathy Frazier, a Parkinson’s patient. The two were riding the 2003 RAGBRAI bicycle tour across Iowa, hoping to raise awareness of the neurodegenerative disease and “show people with Parkinson’s that you don’t have to sit back and let the disease take over your life,” Dr. Alberts said.

But something unexpected happened after the first day’s riding. One of Ms. Frazier’s symptoms was micrographia, a condition in which her handwriting, legible at first, would quickly become smaller, more spidery and unreadable as she continued to write. After a day of pedaling, though, she signed a birthday card with no difficulty, her signature “beautifully written,” Dr. Alberts said. She also told him that she felt as if she didn’t have Parkinson’s."

The article goes on to propose "forced" exercise, that is exercise that is performed at an intensity higher than the patient would normally have chosen, may have significant beneficial effects on Parkinson's Disease characteristics.  I think it is important to recognize that this probably has nothing to do with the patient's internal motivation and whether or not the patient is willing or unwilling to do the exercise. This isn't an unethical use of force by any means! But this *is* a wonderfully intelligent and elegant study design that examines the benefits of the least expensive and yet most effective therapies available to us:  exercise.

Relax your brainstem

If you have not experienced a Franklin Method workshop, you may think it strange to hear you can get amazing results for neck tension by imagining relaxing your brainstem.  What?  Your brainstem?!  Yep, that's where what's left of your reptilian brain lives.  It regulates stuff like blood pressure, respiration, consciousness and your sleep cycle and is located here:

 A skillful teacher of ideokinesis can help you take an image and apply it to your body to achieve release, power, flexibility, or strength.  Perhaps even all four!  One of my favorites is Eric's image of the brain, the brain stem, and the projecting spinal cord.  Imagine your spinal cord is soft and dangling from your brain stem.  What would that feel like?   Close your eyes, and imagine the spinal cord is long, soft, and floating like the tentacles from a jelly.  Watch the video and see how the jelly's tentacles are passively floating through the ocean currents.  Now go back into your own body and imagine your spinal cord floating passively in the cerebrospinal fluid. Do you feel the back of your neck relax and soften like warm butter?  Mmmmm!

This video was taken at the Monterey Bay Aquarium near where I live.  Normally jellies like to swim downward so the tentacles point up, but that didn't fit my image of the brain and the dangling spinal cord so I turned my camera upside-down.  Take THAT you jellies!

Study Suggests Why Acupuncture Might Work | LiveScience Etc.

Study Suggests Why Acupuncture Might Work | LiveScience Etc.

An interesting study published in Nature Neuroscience has discovered one of acupuncture's mechanisms: adenosine. Naturally occurring in the body, adenosine inhibits pain signals after an injury, regulates sleep, and is an anti-inflammatory. Turns out that acupuncture triggers the release of adenosine by stimulating the nerves in the skin. The scientists also administered a cancer drug (deoxycoformycin) that makes it more difficult for the body to remove adenosine, and found that it tripled the amount of adenosine in the tissues and tripled the length of time of the acupuncture's benefits.
Since adenosine is naturally released in response to an injury, I suppose acupuncture is imitating an injury. This must be why my acupuncturist comes in and wiggles those needles. Yowch!

Really? - Throat Exercises Can Relieve Sleep Apnea - Question - NYTimes.com

The NYTimes points out that throat exercises such as

 "swallowing and chewing motions, placing the tip of the tongue against the front of the palate and sliding it back, and pronouncing certain vowels quickly and continuously."

have been found to decrease sleep apnea as well as throat circumference, which is a known risk factor for sleep apnea.  I recommend that, if you can't find a therapist to teach you these special exercises, get yourself a voice coach and study singing, especially singing in English which is one of the most difficult languages to sing nicely. Italian is so much prettier.

Spirituality is blocked, or not blocked, by regions in the brain

 

LiveScience reports:

Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality. The findings hint at the roots of spiritual and religious attitudes, the researchers say.

The study, published in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Neuron, involves a personality trait called self-transcendence, which is a somewhat vague measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors. Self-transcendence "reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole," the researchers explain.  

Before and after surgery, the scientists surveyed patients who had brain tumors removed. The surveys generate self-transcendence scores.

Selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions of the brain induced a specific increase in self-transcendence, or ST, the surveys showed.

Are meditation experts just really good at activating and deactivating certain areas of their brains?  In a concrete sense, is that what meditation is?  I'm thinking of those PET scans of the brains of experienced meditating Tibetan monks and how they showed specific patterns of neural activation (more information here, and here.)

Phys Ed: The Best Exercises for Healthy Bones - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

Several weeks ago, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that should give pause to anyone who plans to live a long and independent life. The study looked at the incidence of hip fractures among older Americans and the mortality rates associated with them. Although the number of hip fractures has declined in recent decades, the study found that the 12-month mortality rate associated with the injury still hovers at more than 20 percent, meaning that, in the year after fracturing a hip, about one in five people over age 65 will die.

via well.blogs.nytimes.com

The author concludes that hopping as exercise would provide adequate challenge to the bone structure.  So dance class has another checkmark in its "benefit" column. Petite allegro (little quick) is a section in ballet class where the dancers learn to jump quickly, with sharp, darting movements that sometimes travel across the floor. 

It's obvious that older folks with poor balance will not be able to move like this.  Physiologically, there's no reason why they can't learn, why they can't be trained to do simple petite allegro exercises.  Every beginning ballet dancer learns to jump with simple combinations; there's no reason we can't do simple exercises with our adults who don't dance.  Just don't ask them for the ballet arms; it makes them feel silly.  

However, hopping or petite allegro is only going to challenge the bone structure of the lower body.  Of course, mortality has been linked to hip fractures which are of course located in the lower body.  In the article, the author discusses bone density in the neck and I'm not sure how hopping is going to influence cervical density.  (Most likely, it was just a side-comment.)  However, I know a few people who fell as older adults and fractured their wrist, so it might be a good idea to come up with a petite allegro-type challenge for the upper body. 

Phantom limbs can contort into impossible configurations : Neurophilosophy

Phantom limbs can contort into impossible configurations

Category: Neuroscience
Posted on: October 28, 2009 1:37 PM, by Mo

FOLLOWING the surgical removal of a body part, amputees often report sensations which seem to originate from the missing limb. This is thought to occur because the brain's model of the body (referred to as the body image) still contains a representation of the limb, and this leads to the experience that the missing limb is still attached to their body. Occasionally, amputees say that they cannot move their phantom limbs - they are perceived to be frozen in space, apparently because they cannot be seen.

Yet, research shows that the body image is malleable and easily manipulated. And according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, phantom limbs can be altered by internal brain mechanisms alone. The study shows that some amputees can make their phantom limbs defy the anatomical constraints of the physical body, using visual imagery to make them perform movements which could not possibly be performed by a real limb.

via scienceblogs.com

This would be the difficult way to get my leg up as high as I want it in ballet class.

The Many Ills of Peripheral Nerve Damage - NYTimes.com

If you have ever slept on an arm and awakened with a “dead” hand, or sat too long with your legs crossed and had your foot fall asleep, you have some inkling of what many people with peripheral neuropathy experience day in and day out, often with no relief in sight.

via www.nytimes.com

I come across folks with this disorder in my practice from time to time.  If you are a movement educator, you will benefit from reading this article for a description of peripheral neuropathy.

Marathons and Heart Attacks

A few years ago, when I was taking Physiology and Biomechanics of Aerobic Exercise, I had read about the curious finding of elevated troponin levels found in some marathoners after races.  Troponin is a molecule found in muscle, and is the blood marker that a heart attack has occurred.  Here’s an article from NYTimes.com that explains this more fully.

Reach for your toes to assess arterial stiffness

How far you can reach beyond your toes from a sitting position (normally used to define the flexibility of the body) may be an indicator of how stiff your arteries are.  Because arterial stiffness often precedes cardiovascular disease, the results suggest that this could become a quick measure of a person’s risk for heart attack or stroke.  Article here.  If you would like a copy of the original PDF, let me know and I can e-mail it to you for your personal use.