Inflammation, lethargy, dopamine and brain disease

You know what the flu is like: not only does everything ache, but you have no energy. Short of a house fire, there is nothing that can persuade you to get off the couch until the whole episode has blown over. Obviously, everything still works if it has to - influenza doesn't cause paralysis - but the bit of your brain that motivates you is switched off. Scientists think this happens so we are forced to save precious energy to fight the infection. Likewise recovering from surgery or a heart attack; we feel weak because tissue healing sucks up resources, so our brain tells us to sit down and be quiet. Recent research has probed why this might be, and it all comes down to inflammation. Inflammation is your body’s common response to a huge range of insults, be they infections or wounds or heart attacks, so your brain is trained to notice when the molecules that transmit inflammatory signals (called cytokines) float by. Recent research suggests they exert their effect via key dopamine pathways. Dopamine is your brain’s feel-good molecule, the one that anti-depressants boost. If you don’t have enough, then you can’t be bothered any more. Doing stuff isn’t worth the effort.

Which is a problem if the inflammation doesn’t go away. Many experts think inflammation underlies big brain diseases like depression and dementia, in which apathy plays a prominent part. Yet inflammation arises from our modern lifestyles: the wrong food, insufficient exercise. What was meant to be a temporary illness state when everybody walked everywhere and ate lots of plants becomes normal and persistent when cars move us everywhere and the supermarket sells flour and sugar in every aisle. If you want to know more, and in particular the way certain plant polyphenol supplements can help a healthy immune balance, have a look at my book The Internal Flame, available from Paper Plus and online at Wildside Publishing. And of course, get yourself a bottle of Lifeguard Essentials.