Brain Health During the Pandemic

For the past 2 years most of world's population has been living in social isolation, uncertainty and fear concerning COVID-19.  How does the novel environmental stimuli of prolonged lockdowns impact the health of the human brain?  This study explores that issue, 

A sample from the article:

While COVID-19 research has seen an explosion in the literature, the impact of pandemic-related societal and lifestyle disruptions on brain health among the uninfected remains underexplored. However, a global increase in the prevalence of fatigue, brain fog, depression and other “sickness behavior”-like symptoms implicates a possible dysregulation in neuroimmune mechanisms even among those never infected by the virus....

Healthy individuals examined after the enforcement of 2020 lockdown/stay-at-home measures demonstrated elevated brain levels of two independent neuroinflammatory markers (the 18 kDa translocator protein, TSPO, and myoinositol) compared to pre-lockdown subjects. The serum levels of two inflammatory markers (interleukin-16 and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1) were also elevated, although these effects did not reach statistical significance after correcting for multiple comparisons. Subjects endorsing higher symptom burden showed higher TSPO signal in the hippocampus (mood alteration, mental fatigue), intraparietal sulcus and precuneus (physical fatigue), compared to those reporting little/no symptoms. Post-lockdown TSPO signal changes were spatially aligned with the constitutive expression of several genes involved in immune/neuroimmune functions....

Collectively, these findings provide support to neuroimmune responses as mechanisms underlying stress, depression and other symptoms of psychological distress (Calcia et al., 2016, DiSabato et al., 2020). Further, the regional variability in increased [11C]PBR28 signal could be predicted by constitutive expression of genes related to glial neuroimmune response in healthy post-mortem human brains. Overall, our results indicate a possible link between pandemic-associated stressors and neuroimmune responses.

Cheers, 

Colin 

The Institute of Positive Biology: Outline of a Bold Vision (re-post 10 years later!)

A post from 10 years ago on this blog, sadly it seems like even more of a fantasy today than a decade ago given the amplification of our fixation on pathology and negativity in recent years.

*Originally posted Feb. 2022  

Imagine you work in fundraising for the Research Office of a university. After calling dozens of eminent alumni, in the hopes of convincing them to make a sizable donation to your university, you finally get some encouraging news. An affluent alumnus wants to meet in person to discuss the possibility of making a sizable donation. But she has some specifics she wants to discuss first.

The next day you sit down for lunch with the potential donor and she informs you that she is prepared to make sizable (i.e. multi-million dollar) donation to the university. However, some conditions apply. Firstly, this donation will only be made if the funds go towards the creation of a new research institute. Secondly, this research institute must be unique; it must stand out from the hundreds of other institutes that already exist in universities around the country and globe. And thirdly, and most importantly, the mission of the institute must be truly ambitious-- it must aspire to promote research that could really be a "game changer" in terms of promoting human health and happiness. These are the three stipulations the donor attaches to the money. You have one week to come up with a coherent, unique and bold vision for this new research institute. What do you come up with?

Below is a brief outline of what my vision would be....

The Institute of Positive Biology (IPB): Dedicated to the Promotion of Health and Happiness

The distinctive focus of IPB is that its diverse group of researchers and scholars study exemplar examples of health and happiness, the goal of which is to translate such findings into novel interventions that can promote the opportunities for humans to flourish. Rather than focusing on pathology, which is the central concern of most research in the biomedical sciences, the IPB focuses instead on the environmental and genetic determinants of health and happiness.

The Institute is interdisciplinary, bringing scientists and scholars together from a variety of disciplines, in both the natural and social sciences. Researchers at IPB exam the determinants of happiness, the positive emotions, optimism, resilience, the genetics of longevity, talent, high level cognitive functioning, etc.

A sample of the societal impact the research of IPB could lead to is captured in the following (at least for now) hypoethical "media releases":

Media Release #1: IPB sequences the genomes of supercentenarians. These rare individuals (approximately 1 in 7 million) ages 110+ may hold the key to developing an aging intervention which could help aging populations delay and compress the chronic diseases of late life.

Media Release #2: IPB finds association between "high level" conversations and self-reported high levels of happiness.

Media Release #3: IPB helps design "happy workplace"-- designed to amplify flow, gratitude, interest, social interactions, etc.-- which actually boosted worker productivity.

Media Release #4: IPB advises local municipality on designing and implementing plans for a new "playful" template to help transform the city into a "play-friendly habitat".

Media Release: #5: IPB publishs study on the effects of cognitive enhancements. Researchers will advise the FDA on the ethical regulation of safe and effective cognitive enhancers that could help boost memory, spatial planning, etc. This research is part of Institute's larger "Realizing Enhancements Initiative: From the Lab to the Market".

Media Release #:6 IPB releases findings on the "Prison and Positive Emotions" project. Interventions designed to elicit the positive emotions were found to help with inmate rehabilitation, reduced inmate violence and significanly lowered the rate of re-offence when compared to the normal prison population.

The Institute of Positive Biology could, I believe, truly be a "game changer". It could help foster the kind of interdisciplinary knowledge needed to significantly improve human health and happiness. Such an institute would be both unique and bold. I hope that, one day, the Institute of Positive Biology can become a reality. [further reading]

Cheers,
Colin

The Sorry State of Canadian Politics

Over the past 16 years of writing in this blog I have never been at a lost for words.  But watching what has unfolded over the past week in Canadian politics, culminating in the Liberal Party and NDP voting together tonight to support invoking the Emergency Act to suppress the protesters opposed to the vaccine mandate for truckers, has left me utterly speechless. Sigh!  

Such a sad reflection on where the politics of this country is in the year 2022.  

Cheers, 

Colin

How Restrictions Impact the Health of the Young

The BMJ has this news piece about a joint programme between the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation to document the data on the impact of the pandemic measures on the mental health of children.  The data story is here, and a few of the worst highlights are:

Cheers, 

Colin

Canada's (Declining Performance) on the Democracy Index

The pandemic continues to erode democratic governance throughout the world. The 2021 Democracy Index reports that last year democracy experienced its biggest annual global decline since 2010. And sadly Canada received it's lowest index score since the report started in the year 2006. This is the report on the state of Canadian government:

"Is Canada becoming more like America?

The sharp decline in the North America average score in 2021 was driven mainly by a deterioration in Canada, whose score fell by 0.37 points to 8.87. New survey data show a worrying trend of disaffection among Canada’s citizens with traditional democratic institutions and increased levels of support for non-democratic alternatives, such as rule by experts or the military. Canada’s citizens feel that they have little control over their lives, a sentiment that has been compounded by pandemic-related restrictions on individual freedoms. Canada’s worsening score raises questions about whether it might begin to suffer from some of the same afflictions as its US neighbour, such as extremely low levels of public trust in political parties and government institutions."

Cheers, 

Colin 

There are (finally!) large-scale protests about Canada's (continued) stringent public health measures

Two years into this pandemic and there are two noteworthy things in Canada I will emphasize in this post:

(1) Canada is ranked #9 in the world, at 81%, for the portion of the population that is fully vaccinated. Canada also ranks #7 out of 195 countries for the most stringent covid restrictions imposed over the past 2 years, which include school closures, restricting public gatherings, restrictions on internal movements, stay-at-home requirements and travel bans.  The only country in the world that is higher than Canada in both these categories is China.  So we ranked behind an authoritarian regime in terms of our willingness to restrict the rights and freedoms of fully vaccinated persons.  IMHO, this should be a source of great shame and embarrassment.  How did we end up with among the highest vaccination rates and the highest restrictions? You might think the former would rule out the latter, or the latter would only be needed if you had low vaccination rates.  

To be honest it still perplexes me, I think the reasons for this are multi-factorial.  I will  highlight three things that I think contributed to this tragic situation:  

(a) Canadians often define themselves in contrast to Americans, so Trump's anti-lockdown stance simply fueled the appetite many of my compatriots had for going "uber-restrictive".  The city of Toronto, for example, had the longest indoor dining ban in the world in 2020/21.  And despite it reaching among the highest vaccinations in the world by the end of 2021, it was locked down (this time with the whole province!) yet again in December 2021.   

(b) Because of the public's appetite for prolonged restrictions, the government did not pursue what would have been the most effective and rational public health measure to pursue during this pandemic- increasing healthcare capacity.  Two years have gone by and somehow the media continues to focus on reports of fully vaccinated University students partying outside, unvaccinated Canadians "overwhelming ICU beds" (despite the fact that most of these beds are used by non-COVID related patients).  Healthcare capacity is not fixed, and yet almost all of the public dialogue and debate presumed it was.  This is symptomatic of a larger problem in Canadian politics- the lack of discussion about private healthcare.  We prefer to stick our heads in the sand.  But this pandemic has revealed the major cracks that exist in the current system. 

(c) Public health officials have continued to obfuscate the issues of deaths and hospitalizations with and from Covid.  This has served their goal of galvanizing broad public support for lockdown measures, but only by imposing a neurotic mindset and anxiety upon most of the population who have been scared into thinking that the young and healthy will likely die from the virus.  Schools are not nursing homes, and truck drivers are not healthcare workers.  But you would not know there is any difference given the amount of school closures over the past two years and the vaccine mandates for workers that work in isolation driving a truck.   

Which brings me to the second point I want to highlight in this post:

(2) The "Freedom Convoy" protests have brought the city of Ottawa to a standstill for over a week now.  To be honest I thought this would have occurred back in June 2020.  Only now are more Canadians finally waking up to notice the reality that they will not get a return to normal life unless they demand their provincial and the federal governments give it back.  Let's hope the protests remain peaceful, and the governments and general population realize that this virus is not going away and we need to find a way to live with it without forfeiting our mental health, education, socializing and pretty much everything else that makes life worth living.  

Now is the time for courage and leadership.  The latter has been lacking since the start of the pandemic.  And the former has never been more important than now.  

Cheers, 

Colin