The Energy Metabolism Dysfunction in Psychiatric Disorders Postmortem Brains: Focus on Proteomic Evidence
Psychiatric disorders represent a great medical and social challenge and people suffering from these conditions face many impairments regarding personal and professional life. In addition, a mental disorder will manifest itself in approximately one quarter of the world's population at some...
www.frontiersin.org
I thank @HDD for linking this study. He asked if there was anything interesting about this study worth mentioning in 2018.
From my understanding there are a lot of interesting things in this study. It mainly confirms a lot about what Ray Peat, Haidut, and Hans were talking about.
This study looks at the brains of people who've passed away from having schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. They did what's called a proteomic analysis. Just learned that it's the study of the protein complement of a cell, tissue, or organism. Couldn't find a definition describing protein complement but they were basically able to identify and determine expression levels of proteins related to energy metabolism. My focus will be on schizophrenia. They found 92 differentially expressed proteins related to energy metabolism.
25% of total glucose is used by the brain. It uses it for glycolysis, the tricarboxylic acid cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation. What's interesting is that in gray matter there is a majority of excitatory synapses and account for most of the energy demands. When there's a need for energy when gray matter is active, there's an increase in blood flow to that area.
Blood sample of antipsychotic schizophrenics have elevated insulin, insulin resistance, hyperglycemia in many, and impaired glucose tolerance.
This extends to having brain regions with lower metabolism and altered blood flow.
This focus is now on unmedicated schizophrenics. One brain region is the cingulate gyrus. Unmedicated schizophrenia patients had lower glucose metabolic rates and volumetric reductions
In a different study, three thalamic nuclei were found to have reduce glucose metabolism. Specifically the pulvinar nucleus's poor glucose metabolism is linked to severity of hallucinations and positive symptoms.
Once again, this highlights the importance of the brain's ability to break down glucose for energy. I will be looking for more herbs to better break it down in the brain. Hans has a great article on optimizing glucose metabolism. The Ultimate Guide to Restoring Glucose Metabolism » TESTONATION
Another brain region the mediodorsal thalamus was found to have significantly lower levels of pyruvate. Probably also has elevated lactate levels and is more acidic.
In Schizophrenia there's mitochondrial dysfunction, mutations, and polymorphisms.
Haidut has always pointed out the importance of oxidative phosphorylation in energy production. Here in Schizophrenics they have alterations in the enzymatic activity of Complex I leading to dysfunction in oxidative phosphorylation and decreased ATP production. In Han's article on glucose metabolism he said "If one of the complexes isn’t working properly, then the NADH and/or FADH2 builds up and the electrons react with oxygen, fats, proteins, DNA, etc., and creates oxidative stress, inflammation, protein damage, etc. It can then also increase lactate dehydrogenase".
He also wrote "Eating a nutritious diet with ample vitamins and minerals (especially vitamin B1, B2, B3, vitamin E, copper and choline) will ensure that the complexes have the proper “building blocks” for running as they should.
A few important compounds that can alternatively accept the electrons from NADH and FADH2 and give it to cytochrome C oxidase are:
This is needed throughout the whole body. But since we're focusing on the brain. That means we need to increase brain levels of these vitamins and compounds. That's why I think sublingual and temple application is working.
It's day 2 of doing sublingual vitamins, minerals, and hormones. So far my voices have been very quiet during the day time and night time. I do believe it's doing something but am still waiting before I get excited.
So this is what I've gathered from this study. Hope this was helpful.