If you could, you would. You can, but prefer not to know it?

More than any other organ, your brain is up to you. You are what you think, not just what you eat. Here’s some food for thought:

Design your Mind

Setting cognitive and behavioral goals raises challenging and worthy questions: What do you want from your brain? Will you know it when you achieve it?

To attain the brain of our choosing, we must understand our selves and current abilities. Introspection and curiosity are helpful if they trigger and sustain the effort to enrich the mind. However, objective information which leads to informed assessment of brain function is often lacking.

Mind your Brain

Honesty. Openness. Self-awareness.

Irrefutable virtues, but in practice most people fall short. Few regularly appraise their brain skills; even so, the ability to accurately judge one’s own mental performance is not guaranteed. I believe the first step to minding the brain is shedding hang-ups while offering and soliciting frank feedback from family and close confidants. In the clinical setting, routine cognitive screening and “mental check ups” are not currently practiced, in part due to time constraints and limited utility of traditional paper-and-pencil tests. From a public health perspective, the U.S. Preventative Task Force reviewed Read the rest of this entry »

You have may have seen a few weeks ago the interview between former US presidential contender John Edwards and reporter Bob Woodruff. All the resulting media coverage centered on Edwards’ declarations. However, there is something much more remarkable that surfaced at that interview: Bob Woodruff’s spectacular recovery.

This is the same reporter who suffered a severe traumatic brain injury when a roadside bomb detonated next to his vehicle in January 29th 2006 as he was covering news developments in Iraq.

Today we are fortunate to interview Lee Woodruff, Bob’s wife and pillar throughout his recovery. Lee and Bob co-wrote the fantastic book In an Instant: A Family’s Journey of Love and Healing.

Alvaro Fernandez: Lee, many thanks for your time. I was amazed reading your book, where you share your journey, and then watching Bob interview John Edwards, the best display I can imagine of his recovery. Can you please summarize for us what Bob -and you- went through since January 2006?

Lee Woodruff: As you know, Bob suffered a life-threatening traumatic brain injury in Iraq. He was promptly taken under military care and underwent a series of surgeries for head injuries, with a joint Army & Air Force neurosurgical team in Iraq, in a US Army Medical Command hospital in Germany, and at Bethesda Naval Hospital, back here in the US.

During this time, spanning around 4 months, he spent 37 days in coma, and his skull had to be surgically rebuilt. The cognitive rehabilitation process started then, at a medical facility closer home.

Can you please explain what kind of cognitive rehab Bob has gone though-both in a formal way, with a therapist, and informally, on his own?

The first thing I’d like to say is that rehab is a long process. Doctors told me that Bob, despite the severity of his injuries, had better chances to recover than other victims, because of the reserve of neurons and connections he had built thanks to Read the rest of this entry »

You know your weight. And your physical fitness. And a variety of health-related metrics.

What about your brain fitness?

Two recent announcements bring out how the assessment of cognitive abilities, or brain functions, is increasingly being done thanks to new computerized options:

1) Last week, OptumHealth announced an exclusive 3-year agreement (estimated at $18m) with the Australian company Brain Resource. OptumHealth will be embedding the Brain Resource platform into their overall Behavioral Solutions program.

- OptumHealth Behavioral Solutions will work with Brain Resource to provide clinicians with a Web-based assessment that measures general cognition (how people process information) and social cognition (how people manage their emotions). This 40-minute assessment is based on well-known and validated tests of memory, attention, executive function, and response speed, and mood, social skills and emotional resilience.

Read the rest of this entry »

July is shaping up to be a fascinating month, full of cognitive health research reports and applications. Here you have a roundup, covering food for the brain, cognitive assessments, mental training and DNA, and more.

1) Brain foods: the effects of nutrients on brain function (Nature Neuroscience)

The Aspen Health Forum gathered an impressive group of around 250 people to discuss the most pressing issues in Health and Medical Science (check out the Program and the Speakers bios), on October 3-6th. It was the first conference, by the way, where I have heard a speaker say: “I resuscitated a woman yesterday”.

Key highlights and trends:

1- Global health problems require the attention of the scientific community. Richard Klausner encouraged the scientific community to focus on Global Problems: maternal mortality rates, HIV/ AIDS, nutrition, cancer, clean water.  Bill Frist, former Senate Majority Leader, added to that list the increasing epidemic risks of global zootic diseases (transmitted between humans and animals), supported by 2 interesting data points: at any one moment, there are 500,000 people flying worldwide; in a year, airlines transport the equivalent of 2 billion passengers.

2- “Let’s get real…Ideology kills”. Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, on what it takes to stop HIV/ AIDS: “I am from Ireland, a Catholic country. And I am Catholic. But I can see how ideology kills..we need more empathy with reality, and to work with local women in those countries who need things like female condoms.” She was implicitly criticizing the large budget devoted to unrealistic abstinence programs. This session included a fascinating exchange where Bill Frist rose from the audience to defend the role of US aid, explaining how 60% of retroviral drugs in African countries have been funded by the American taxpayer, highlighting President Bush’s courage to make HIV/AIDS a top agenda item in many developing countries, and criticizing other countries for not doing enough. Which made Nobel Prize Laureate Peter Agre, also in the audience, stand up and encourage the US to really step up to the plate and devote 1% of the GDP to aid, as a number of European countries do, instead of 0.1%.

3- Where is the new “Sputnik”?: Basic science is crucial for innovation and for economic growth, but it is often underappreciated. Scientists are not “nerds”, as sometimes they are portrayed in popular culture, but people with a deep curiosity and drive to solve a Big problem. Many of the speakers had been inspired by the Sputnik and the Apollo missions to become scientists, at a time when the profession was considered cool. Two Nobel Prize Laureates (Peter Agre, Michael Bishop), talked about their lives and careers trying to demystify what it takes to be a scientist and to win a Nobel Prize. Both are grateful to the taxpayers dollars that funded their research, and insist we must do a better job at explaining the scientific process to society at large. Both are proud of having attended small liberal arts colleges, and having evolved from there, fueled by their great curiosity and unpredictable, serendipitous paths, into launching new scientific and medical fields.  Bishop listed a number of times where he made decisions that were considered “career suicide” by mentors and colleagues, and mentioned “I was confused” around 15 times in 15 minutes…down to earth and inspiring.

4- We need a true Health Care Culture: Mark Ganz summarized it best by explaining how his health provider group improved care when they redefined themselves from “we are 7,000 employees” to “we are a 3 million strong community”, moving from Read the rest of this entry »