Curated Paper 2

Ashley Rice

Biol 4500-01

Dr. Karpel

Curated Paper 2

            Just like imbalance can lead to disease or illness and can negatively affect any organ in the body, it can also cause illness to the brain. There are many brain disorders, but the ones I am going to talk about in this paragraph are neurological disorders. These types of disorders include Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. I have had personal experiences with Alzheimer’s. My great grandma had Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and I believe it started when she was about 65 years old. She was always a happy person, but it was definitely hard to get her to do stuff when she did not want to. An example of this would be showering. She was very stubborn. She forgot many things, especially myself and other younger family members. However, when we went to visit her and you would say “Hi Grandma,” her face would light up with recognition and she would remember that she did indeed have great grandkids. My great aunt has just been recently diagnosed with AD, and she is not as nice as my great grandma was. She is one of those cases where she will leave the house, not realizing who she is or where she is going. She also gets angry and is slightly aggressive. It seems that AD is genetic to women in the family, as none of the men have had it. This is something that concerns me, because I could potentially carry the gene for Alzheimer’s. For now, I plan on taking all the preventative measures I can to help lower my chances of getting AD. This includes exercising, keeping my mind active, and eating the right diet, which involves a lot of dark green veggies. This leads back to Ayurveda and balance. If I can keep this balance strong in my life, I could potentially lower my risk of getting Alzheimer’s.

            Another brain disease that can form is Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. For our research proposal, my group decided to write about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE. CTE is a degenerative brain disease that occurs because of repeated brain traumas to the head. I found some links between the neurological disorders we have talked about in class and CTE. The diseases we have discussed in class that are possibly linked to CTE are Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Another one which we have not talked about yet is ALS. The interesting and common link I found in all of these disorders is abnormalities in a couple proteins in the brain. One of the proteins is the tau protein, such as in ALS and Alzheimer’s. In Alzheimer’s we talked about tangle in neurons that can lead to cell death. These tangles are the improper folding of the tau protein. The other protein is called alpha-synuclein, which can be deposited and clump together, leading to Parkinson’s. The malfunctioning of these proteins is usually triggered by head trauma. It is interesting that something as small as irregular folding or amounts of proteins in a neuron can lead to such dramatic mental disorders that not only change behavior and cognitive aspects of the brain, but also cause physical and motor abnormalities as well. As we have discussed with Ayurveda, one little thing can throw everything else out of balance.

When talking about concussions, the topic of treatment came up and if there really is a solid treatment that every doctor uses and is confident in. We learned that no brain injury heals the same way, and no person heals the same way, which is interesting. Treatments can be totally different for people. One treatment could work great for one person, but that same treatment could be ineffective on someone else. I looked up the treatments for concussions. The Mayo Clinic suggests that rest is the most important thing to help the brain recover from an injury. When a doctor says to rest, that means both physically and mentally. Physical activities should be avoided, as should activities that force you to concentrate or focus really hard. This includes video games, texting, school work, etc. Once the symptoms start to get better, more activities can be added. After this, the doctor will discuss when it is okay to return to sports, as concussions are usually seen in athletes. I think it is really interesting how simple this treatment is. There is not very much that can be done for a concussion, except to prevent the brain from becoming more injured during this time of vulnerability. I also find in interesting that different athletes could be told to do this same treatment from their doctors, but it could take each one different times to recover. They receive and execute the same treatment, yet one person may heal weeks faster than somebody else. Imbalance can lead the brain to become ill, as mentioned above. I have talked about brain diseases, but there is also mental illnesses.

            In class we read a paper that discussed the mind versus the brain. The main point of the article was that terms dealing with mind and brain should not be separate, but considered together when treating patients with mental disorders. It makes me think back to how Ayurveda deals with the mind, spirit, and body. In this case, it seems that the brain would be representing the body, and the body and brain should be considered together. The article was specifically on personality disorders. Aspects of the mind can influence aspects of the brain. For example, certain traumatic events in childhood could eventually lead to abnormalities of the hippocampus in adulthood as the person tries to fight or deal with those memories and stress in their own ways. As for treatment, medications (the brain side) and psychotherapy (the mind side) should be used together in treating mental diseases. I am currently taking abnormal psychology. My professor was asked in class once which way he prefers to treat his patients; with medications or therapy? His answer to us was that it is very beneficial to the patient if both can be used. It is like the two work together to help treat the patients. Medications may be a better treatment for one disorder whereas therapy may work better for others, but together they can really make a difference. I think it may also depend on the person as well. Someone may respond better to therapy than medication or vice versa.

            Today, there is a debate on the ethics of whether or not it is okay to modify genes that cause diseases, including mental illnesses and brain diseases mentioned previously. This debate is on gene therapy and whether or not it is ethical, whether or not it should be done. Personally, I can see both sides of the argument. I think it would be absolutely amazing to target genes that cause certain diseases and get rid of them. It would be one less disease to worry about. Eventually, maybe we can start getting to the point where we could eliminate all potentially harmful or bad genes. This is where it starts to get tricky. Is that even possible, and more importantly, is it something we should pursue if it is possible? Diseases are awful. They hurt people and their families and make living difficult. They are dangerous, and many are potentially fatal. However, imagine if we got rid of all of these diseases. Imagine if there was no gene to cause a disease, because we deleted it. It sounds amazing, don’t get me wrong, but there’s also a thought I keep having that this could potentially lead to something even worse. I’m thinking in terms of natural selection here. There would be no diversity, as we all know. Would the population rapidly grow, and lead us to eventually overpopulate the earth and use all the resources? More so than we are now, that is. I can see why there is such a debate on this. We think we know what will happen if we could just delete these genes, but do we really know? For all we know, some of these genes could affect something else, and deleting it could throw things in the human body off of balance. Ayurveda could be severely impacted. We don’t know for sure what could happen, even though it would be amazing to be rid of some of these awful diseases.

            There is another interesting topic involved with gene therapy, and that is genetic testing. I thought it was really great that this came up, because my sister and I just had a conversation about this not too long ago. Alzheimer’s has shown up in a couple women in my family, leading my sister and me to think that the gene could possibly be carried through the women on one side of the family. We have discussed getting a genetic test to see if we carry the gene. I do not think my odds are great, considering I carry many genes from that side of the family, whereas my sister does not. This leads to a debate in my mind, as I am sure it does for everybody. Does the burden of not knowing outweigh the burden of knowing? I am not sure. I think if I knew that I had a much higher risk of getting Alzheimer’s, I could take preventative measures to lower my chances. This is the plus side of knowing and the downside of not knowing. On the flip side, not knowing means I would not have to worry about it for the rest of my life, and start to become anxious as I get older. The more I have thought about it, I have come to the conclusion that for me, the burden of not knowing is less than the burden of knowing. Connecting this with Ayurveda, I know that if I find out that my chances of getting Alzheimer’s is high, I would stress about it. I tend to overthink things, and something like this would really weigh on my mind. This is not healthy, and could really impact my Ayurveda and harm the balance of my life. The constant stress and anxiety of knowing will be mentally exhausting, and I am sure will lead to greater issues, besides Alzheimer’s.

             There are risks to gene therapy, which is why there is a debate right now on whether or not it is ethical. One risk I found interesting was that during gene therapy, a new gene can be inserted into the wrong place in the DNA. This is scary to think about. Knowing what we have learned our whole college career about DNA, is that if one little thing goes wrong, bad things can happen. This can be a frameshift in DNA sequence or just the improper folding of a single protein. Inserting the new gene in the wrong spot could not only cause the new gene to not function at all, but maybe to even cause a different function. It could change the structure and function, resulting in a potential major change in the body. There is so much held in DNA, this could throw anything and everything off balance. I imagine inserting a new gene is a very, very precise and careful process.

            After reading the paper “The Ethics of CRISPR”, I found disability as an objection of CRISPR interesting and found that it is a standpoint I have pertaining to CRISPR, until I read the paper I can see why others argue that using gene therapy and CRISPR to genetically modify genes for disabilities gives a sort of message that those with these disabilities are less human and become devalued. It makes sense, but if you really think about, that is not the message this gene therapy is trying to send. Saving a child from these disabilities makes it so that the child can live a life with more capability to do anything. For people with disabilities, there are limits and restrictions to what they can do and what they can experience. Modifying these genes simply gets rid of these obstacles and allows a person to potentially have more opportunities in the future. It can help them achieve the ultimate balance in life.