Holidays may offer more challenges than cheer for chronic Lyme patients

By Jill Ross

While many people anticipate the holidays with excitement, those suffering with chronic illnesses may approach the holiday season with anxiety and even dread.

A chronic illness can make normal everyday life challenging enough. The extra expectations and demands of the holidays can turn this joyous season into a difficult time that can result in poorer health and, in some cases, a full relapse.

Chronic Lyme disease patients suffer from a myriad of symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog, memory issues, muscle and joint pain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, food allergies and sensitivities. There may also be central nervous system issues, such as Bell’s palsy and muscle twitching and buzzing.

Symptoms may wax and wane as patients follow complex regimens of medications, supplements, alternative treatments and extreme self-care.

New stress on top of old stress

“The holidays add a new stress that you don’t have on a day-to-day basis,” says Robin M., a former financial analyst who has been living with Lyme disease, babesiosis, Bartonella and mycoplasma for more than 20 years.

“And as a wife and mother, most of the work involved with the holidays falls in your lap.”

Robin has experienced all kinds of holidays since she became ill in 1999. From the Christmas she spent at home alone when she was on IV antibiotics and so ill she could only crawl, to the years she overextended herself by entertaining a house full of guests, she has learned that she must put her own health needs first.

“It’s not worth having a six-month recovery,” Robin acknowledges after relapsing multiple times after the holidays. She no longer offers to host the extended family, has scaled back on decorating, and is extremely cautious about traveling.

“I now do everything I can to stay well,” she says. She adheres to a strict gluten-free and organic diet and avoids sugar and grains. “You have to make a choice not to relapse. You have to take care of yourself.”

Scaling back helps

Becky K., a small business owner, agrees. She has been dealing with Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever following a tick bite eight years ago.

“I have scaled back my holidays majorly,” says Becky. She no longer hosts parties for 30 to 40 friends and business associates. Gone also are baking 12 dozen cookies, putting up two Christmas trees, having decorations everywhere and marathon shopping.

“Once I’ve crossed the line and done too much, it’s too late” she says. “Then the Bell’s palsy, fatigue and brain fog set in and can stay for three to four months.”

Becky has learned to listen to her body and take care of her own needs first. When she recently prepared to have her family visiting for Thanksgiving, she took time out for a massage the day before they arrived.

She has also found that doing yoga and practicing tai chi can keep the muscle twitching and buzzing sensation in her body at bay.

Temptations of sugar

Donna W.’s biggest holiday challenge is dealing with the sugary treats that abound during the season. A retired training specialist who has lived with Lyme disease for 26 years, Donna avoids sugar, white flour, dairy products and alcohol. Her challenge is making 120 to 380 cookies for her church and family members without being tempted to eat them.

“Sugar is addictive. It’s the same as drugs or alcohol, so the best strategy for me is to live clean and to stay off it,” says Donna. Some years she does better than others, but she lives in fear of getting ill again. “The idea of a relapse is terrifying.”

Dealing with family at the holidays can be another tricky issue for those with chronic Lyme disease. Family members often don’t understand the illness. Navigating family gatherings can be challenging for the patient who feels misunderstood and the family members who don’t know how to respond.

Family misunderstandings

Beth N., a retired U.S. Forest Service firefighter with Lyme disease and Bartonella that went undiagnosed for 15 years, was too ill to make the trip from California to her home state of West Virginia.

“When I finally made it back East, my in-laws wondered why they had not seen me for three years. They thought I did not like them. They didn’t understand that I was sick,” says Beth.

“Their only experience with Lyme disease was knowing someone who had a tick bite and was fine after a short course of antibiotics.”

Because there are usually no outward signs that one is suffering from Lyme, patients are often told that they “look great” even when they feel poorly.

Rather than trying to explain the struggles going on inside their bodies and brains, many patients smile and act like they are fine,.This distances them even more from their family and friends, adding to the misunderstanding of this complex and challenging illness.

“People think you’re OK because you look normal. In reality, I’m spending all my energy trying to act like I’m OK,” notes Beth.

Need to simplify

Despite the challenges they face, these members of a local Lyme disease support group have learned to prioritize their health and wellbeing during the holiday season and have embraced a simpler and easier approach to celebrating.

“I actually enjoy the holidays more now,” says Becky. “Illness teaches you that life is fragile. Now I am more mindful of people and my moments with them. I really enjoy it.”

Jill Ross is a Lyme patient who leads the North Central West Virginia Lyme Community support group. 

Dr. Sara Gottfried Shares Tips to Keep Your Brain Sharp with Age

by Sara Gottfried, MD

My granny blinked behind her glasses as she drove us to her home after school, trying to conceal her panic. It was 1975. I was 7 years old, and she was 50. Granny wasn’t sure where to turn her Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme next. The distance between the school bus stop and her home was only 5 miles, but we were lost.

When my grandmother’s memory and then her personality drained out of her due to Alzheimer’s disease, I didn’t know that women are at double the risk of Alzheimer’s compared with men.1-3 I didn’t recognize that her risk began in her 40s, at the time that she was taking caring of me after school because my parents both worked full time. Now I understand that her cognitive decline was probably due to issues related to her blood sugar, fondness for drinking two or three martinis every night, and loss of estrogen associated with perimenopause and menopause.

As one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the US, Alzheimer’s disease has a weighty burden.4 While an estimated 5 million Americans 65 years or older have Alzheimer’s, that number is predicted to triple by the year 2060.5 I went to medical school because I wanted to help people. When I was 21 and my beloved grandmother was in a nursing home unable to recognize me, I got clear about my “why.” I wanted to cure Alzheimer’s disease.

At Harvard Medical School, I learned the wretched news about Alzheimer’s disease. Not only was it miserable for the patient, caregivers, and family—but the lack of treatment made the medical training grim. Neurologists were beaten. Their mantra was, “Diagnose and adios,” because there was no reliable way to prevent or treat it. I chose instead to go into gynecology. Since then, more than 99% of drug trials for Alzheimer’s have been total failures.6-7 Currently approved medications fail to stop or slow the progress of the disease; the four Alzheimer’s drugs on the market that may reduce memory loss and confusion do so only for a limited time.8

But as a gynecologist, I discovered another approach. It’s called personalized lifestyle medicine, and it acknowledges that all chronic disease—including Alzheimer’s disease,9 cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease—stems from inflammation that begins years, maybe decades, before the diagnosis.10-11 So the strategy is to work upstream and systematically with lifestyle changes—the way you eat, move, think, and supplement—in order to prevent the inflammation and therefore the diagnosis. (Inflammation, which I think of as a frat party gone wrong, starts in your brain in your forties, like it did with my grandmother.) In mainstream medicine, the old-school idea is that there’s a pill for every ill, but that hasn’t worked in Alzheimer’s. But there is a multidimensional approach, which ultimately has pleiotropic effects, meaning that it is simultaneously capable of producing multiple benefits—it lowers inflammation, increases brain metabolism and connections between nerve cells, increases remembering and decreases forgetting, and may even reverse cognitive decline. Lifestyle medicine serves as the basis of the work of my friend and colleague Dale Bredesen, MD, who has improved or reversed early Alzheimer’s disease in a series of 100 patients.12 He describes Alzheimer’s as a disease where you have “36 holes in the roof.”13 You need to patch all of the holes to see improvement.

In my medical practice, I do not take care of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Instead, I take care of women aged 35 and older who are noticing the earliest signs of cognitive issues, like the forgotten keys or appointments, the stopping mid-sentence because they can’t find the word they are looking for. They don’t have 36 holes in their roof;13 they have 3 or 5. Together we patch the holes, they feel better, and we may have dodged a diagnosis in their future.

In this blog series, I’ll be writing about my experience with helping women care about their brains much earlier—ideally in your 30s, 40s, and 50s. I’ll describe what has been most effective based on which holes you may have in your roof.

Here’s today’s tip: One of the best ways to stave off a scary diagnosis like Alzheimer’s is to pay attention to your blood sugar. Know your fasting blood sugar, a simple test that most patients undergo once every year or two. According to the latest estimates from the CDC, more than 100 million US adults are now living with diabetes (i.e., fasting blood sugar ≥126 mg/dL) or prediabetes (i.e., fasting blood sugar ≥100 mg/dL).14 I don’t want you to be one of those statistics; I want you to live long and well with a healthy brain clear of debris and deposits. Starting at age 40, fasting blood sugar climbs about 1-2 mg/dL per decade (and blood sugar levels following a meal increase up to 15 mg/dL per decade),15-16 unless you are actively doing something about it. High blood sugar levels (e.g. diabetes) pointedly increase risk for developing dementia, by about 60%.17-18 Make normalizing your blood sugar a top priority by doing the following.

• Know your numbers, including fasting blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c is a 3-month average of your blood sugar levels).
• Keep your blood sugar from rising too high by avoiding sugar and foods that trigger inflammation for you, which may include gluten and dairy, among others. Follow an elimination diet.
• Limit alcohol. The latest research shows there is no safe level, especially for women.19 Alcohol is a brain toxin and increases the risk of many cancers, including breast.20
• Exercise a minimum of 30 minutes per day and ideally 1 hour. Perform high-intensity interval training (HIIT) to make your cells hungry for glucose so that the glucose can be pulled out of the bloodstream to feed your muscles.
• Meditate, pray, or find some other way to objectively witness your experience so that stress doesn’t raise your cortisol (stress hormone) and drive up blood sugar.21
• Optimize your levels by keeping fasting blood sugar 70-85 mg/dL and HbA1c < 5%.
• To learn more about personalized lifestyle medicine for the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, check out Alzheimer’s-related science and educational tools.

If you remember nothing else from this column, know that rising blood sugar leads to metabolic inflexibility, which decreases plasticity of the nerve cells, particularly in the hippocampus,22 the part of the brain involved in memory consolidation and emotional regulation. So the trick is to stay metabolically flexible with lots of connections between nerve cells in the brain. Pay attention to “holes in your roof” and patch them early, starting with your blood sugar. My granny didn’t, but you can.

Citations

1. Hamilton J. NPR. Women’s brains appear more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s than men’s. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/21/425054345/womens-brains-appear-more-vulnerable-to-alzheimers-than-mens. Accessed November 7, 2018.
2. Fifield K. AARP. What being a woman means for your dementia risk. https://www.aarp.org/health/dementia/info-2018/women-alzheimers-pregnancy-link.html. Accessed November 7, 2018.
3. Lin KA et al. Marked gender differences in progression of mild cognitive impairment over 8 years. Alzheimers Dement (N Y). 2015;1(2):103-110.
4. Xu J et al. Deaths: final data for 2007. Natl Vital Stat Rep. 2010;58(19):1-19.
5. Matthews KA et al. Racial and ethnic estimates of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in the United States (2015-2060) in adults aged ≥65 years. Alzheimers Dement. 2018;S1552-5260(18)33252-7.
6. Cummings JL et al. Alzheimer’s disease drug-development pipeline: few candidates, frequent failures. Alzheimers Res Ther. 2014;6(4):37.
7. Bushak L. Medical Daily. 99% of Alzheimer’s drug trials in the past decade have failed, and there’s an ‘urgent’ need to improve therapies. https://www.medicaldaily.com/99-alzheimers-drug-trials-past-decade-have-failed-and-theres-urgent-need-improve-therapies-291566. Accessed November 9, 2018.
8. Alzheimer’s Association. Medications for memory. https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/treatments/medications-for-memory. Accessed November 9, 2018.
9. Kinney JW. Inflammation as a central mechanism in Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimers Dement (N Y). 2018;4:575-590.
10. Hunter P. The inflammation theory of disease. The growing realization that chronic inflammation is crucial in many diseases opens new avenues for treatment. EMBO Rep. 2012;13(11):968-970.
11. Minihane AM et al. Low-grade inflammation, diet composition and health: current research evidence and its translation. Br J Nutr. 2015;114(7):999-1012.
12. Bredesen DE et al. Reversal of cognitive decline: 100 patients. J Alzheimers Dis Parkinsonism. 2018;8:5.
13. Ash M. Clinical Education. https://www.clinicaleducation.org/resources/reviews/36-holes-in-the-roof-the-dawn-of-the-era-of-treatable-and-preventable-alzheimers-disease/. Accessed November 9, 2018.
14. CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0718-diabetes-report.html. Accessed November 7, 2018.
15. Samos LF et al. Diabetes mellitus in older persons. Med Clin North Am. 1998;82(4):791-803.
16. Pani LN et al. Effect of aging on A1C levels in individuals without diabetes: evidence from the Framingham Offspring Study and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001-2004. Diabetes Care. 2008;31(10):1991-1996.
17. Chatterjee S et al. Type 2 diabetes as a risk factor for dementia in women compared with men: a pooled analysis of 2.3 million people comprising more than 100,000 cases of dementia. Diabetes Care. 2016;39(2):300-307.
18. dLife. Type 3 diabetes. https://dlife.com/type-3-diabetes/. Accessed November 7, 2018.
19. GBD 2016 Alcohol and Drug Use Collaborators. The global burden of disease attributable to alcohol and drug use in 195 countries and territories, 1990-2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016. Lancet Psychiatry. 2018;5(12):987-1012.
20. McDonald JA et al. Alcohol intake and breast cancer risk: weighing the overall evidence. Curr Breast Cancer Rep. 2013;5(3).
21. UCSF. Diabetes Education Online. https://dtc.ucsf.edu/types-of-diabetes/type2/understanding-type-2-diabetes/how-the-body-processes-sugar/blood-sugar-stress/. Accessed November 9, 2018.
22. Kanoski SE et al. Western diet consumption and cognitive impairment: links to hippocampal dysfunction and obesity. Physiol Behav. 2011;103(1):59-68.

Sara Gottfried, MD

Sara Gottfried, MD is a board-certified gynecologist and physician scientist. She graduated from Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed residency at the University of California at San Francisco. Over the past two decades, Dr. Gottfried has seen more than 25,000 patients and specializes in identifying the underlying cause of her patients’ conditions to achieve true and lasting health transformations, not just symptom management.

Dr. Gottfried is the President of Metagenics Institute, which is dedicated to transforming healthcare by educating, inspiring, and mobilizing practitioners and patients to learn about and adopt personalized lifestyle medicine. Dr. Gottfried is a global keynote speaker who practices evidence-based integrative, precision, and Functional Medicine. She has written three New York Times bestselling books: The Hormone Cure, The Hormone Reset Diet, and her latest, Younger: A Breakthrough Program to Reset Your Genes, Reverse Aging, and Turn Back the Clock 10 Years.

Holiday Sale through the end of January 1st

View this email in your browser

JES Organic's Newsletter Keeping you up-to-date on our amazing organically infused NON-TOXIC products

Holiday Sale continues through the end of January 1st.  Some items are limited, first come, first serve.  Sale Prices posted on the web-site, No coupon needed.  Free shipping at $100 or more.  We truly value your continued loyalty and support of our business. SHOP NOW Major loopholes in federal law allow the cosmetics industry to include unlimited amounts of chemicals in personal care products with inadequate labeling requirements and with no required testing or monitoring of health effects. Since the FDA does not regulate the use of these products, manufacturers are not even required to disclose some of these toxic chemicals as ingredients on their label. LEARN MORE NEW ITEMS! Beautiful NEW Lipstick Colors!  I love these lipsticks because they don't have that typical commercial lipstick taste.  Lead free, paraben free and non-toxic.  Made in the USA. No Animal Testing.     Lip Gloss  All Natural Luscious Lip Gloss with Certified Organic Ingredients, Gluten Free, Cruelty Free, Vegan. Preservative-free formula with an infusion of antioxidant-rich botanical extracts, essential oils & pigments. Made in the USA. No Animal Testing.   Buy Now MORE NEW ITEMS! All Natural Handcrafted Organic Soap Bars - These natural soaps don't dry out your skin.  Check out all of the wonderful 'scents' we have.  Sulfate & paraben free.  Save when you purchase 4 or 8 bars. We only use essential oils for scent, NO synthetic fragrances.     Buy Now Copyright © 2018 JES Organics, All rights reserved. Located in Mesquite, Nevada

Loneliness & Alzheimer's Disease

So proud of my son the first author in this latest research paper published 12-18-18.

Loneliness has been associated with higher brain amyloid-β deposition, a biologic marker of Alzheimer’s disease, in cognitively normal older adults, suggesting a link with preclinical Alzheimer’s disease pathophysiology.  Read the full article here: Regional tau pathology and loneliness in cognitively normal older adults

Seasons Greetings Holiday Sale 2018

JES Organic's Newsletter Keeping you up-to-date on our amazing organically infused NON-TOXIC products Holiday Sale starts Saturday, December 15th through December 26th.  Sale Prices posted on the web-site, No coupon needed.  Free shipping at $100 or more.  Some quantities are limited.  First come, first serve so don't snooze on this sale!  Sorry, no rainchecks or discounts on orders placed before sale starts.  We will be closed on December 24th at 12 noon and all day on December 25th. SHOP NOW Major loopholes in federal law allow the cosmetics industry to include unlimited amounts of chemicals in personal care products with inadequate labeling requirements and with no required testing or monitoring of health effects. Since the FDA does not regulate the use of these products, manufacturers are not even required to disclose some of these toxic chemicals as ingredients on their label. LEARN MORE NEW ITEMS! Beautiful NEW Lipstick Colors!  I love these new lipsticks for so many reasons.  Besides being Lead free, paraben free and non-toxic, they don't have that typical commercial lipstick taste.  Made in the USA. No Animal Testing.   Lip Gloss  All Natural Luscious Lip Gloss with Certified Organic Ingredients, Gluten Free, Cruelty Free, Vegan. Preservative-free formula with an infusion of antioxidant-rich botanical extracts, essential oils & pigments. Made in the USA. No Animal Testing.   Buy Now MORE NEW ITEMS! All Natural Handcrafted Organic Soap Bars - These natural soaps don't dry out your skin.  Check out all of the wonderful 'scents' we have.  Sulfate & paraben free.  Save when you purchase 4 or 8 bars. We only use essential oils for scent, NO synthetic fragrances.     Buy Now Copyright © 2018 JES Organics, All rights reserved. Located in Mesquite, Nevada Want to change how you receive these emails?  We only send out holiday sale and important news notifications.  If you unsubscribe, you will not know when we are having a sale.  You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.