Curated Paper 2 : Maleah Johnson

     The brain is one of the most important organs within our bodies, yet we don’t know a lot about it.  There are so many diseases, and disorders that we know about, but are not sure how they progress or how they are able to be treated.  The harder thing is that symptoms can vary from person to person due to everyone’s brain being different.  Yes there are the same symptoms that will be presented, but it’s how they infect the individual that is varied.  There are different types of brain diseases, such as; neurological disorders, storage disorders, personality and mood disorders, developmental, as well as prion diseases.  Dementia is one of the disorders that lies underneath the neurological disorders area of brain diseases.  Dementia is a disease that many individuals have had to deal with, especially in relation to their loved ones.  Dementia is defined as the deterioration of intellectual abilities due to disease.  This is a disease that affects many different areas of the brain including; memory, judgment, concentration, and can occur usually with personality changes, and emotional stability.  There are many diseases that can cause dementia, some of those diseases are; stroke, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s disease, Korsakoff’s syndrome (severe amnesia), as well as Alzheimer’s disease.  When one of my grandparents passed away, he had been sick for a couple of years by this time, but right before he passed I was able to visit him back home, since this was during my freshman year, but I believe he had been experiencing dementia episodes.  My grandma was telling me that he didn’t remember a lot of the grandkids names, but he remembered mine at the time.  It was something that was hard to hear due to my siblings and my cousins spending everyday at my grandparents during the summer, and my grandpa would pick us up from school every Friday to spend time together while my parents were at work.  This was one of my core memories from my childhood, so hearing that he was forgetting who some of us are, was hard to swallow.  There were times I would call and let him know that I was coming over to visit, but by the time I got there and walked inside the house, he always acted very surprised that I was coming over to see him. 

 One of the stories that stood out to me the most while researching different types of brain injuries was the story about Phineas P. Gage.  This is a story I really only found out about 2 years ago, and I thought the individual who was telling it to me was lying to see how much I would believe.  I ended up looking this up and was really shocked to find out that this story was true.  The story of Phineas P. Gage is one that baffled me for a long time, due to injuries that this happening, especially in the brain, always end in death, but he didn’t.  From what I’ve seen and heard, when you get struck with anything in the brain, you might be alive for a few moments but you will ultimately face death.  This is something I’ve always believed until I came across the story of Phineas P. Gage.  From what articles about his accident state, Phineas was working on a railroad when the accident happened.  An iron tamping rod was driven through his head, entering below his left cheekbone and exiting from the tip of his skull.  From what we now know about the brain, the tamping rod passed through Phineas’ left frontal lobe, which is associated with decision making, planning, as well as personality.  From what we know about Phineas it’s said that his behavior changed drastically after the accident, completely changing who he was and how he acted, especially towards others around him.  Before the accident he was known for his responsible and agreeable nature, but after the accident he was described to have become impulsive, profane, and unreliable.  We truly don’t know as much as we could about the brain, but the brain is one of the most important organs within the human body.  This provides our thinking, our actions, and shows how to program who we are as individuals.

The brain makes up who we are as people, how we process situations thrown at us, how we remember the things we have experienced throughout our lives.  This is something we think we know a lot about.  In reality we don’t know as much as we would like about the brain, due to it being the most complex and often mysterious organ within the human body.  When I looked more into what we actually know about the brain, it listed the following as known; basic functions, brain regions, and neural networks.  Basic functions are something we have a good understanding about, such as controlling movement, regulating senses, and processing emotions.  Brain regions we also know about, due to teaching it within courses and how we know what controls come to each region, but we’ve identified specific brain regions associated with different functions.  For example, the hippocampus for memory and the prefrontal cortex for decision making.  We are beginning to understand neural networks by understanding how neurons connect to form complex networks that underlie our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  Some things that are still a mystery to us would include; consciousness, memory formation, complex thought, and brain plasticity.  When thinking about consciousness we are still unsure about how the brain gives rise to consciousness, we don’t know much about how those functions work themselves.  While we know that the hippocampus is involved in memory formation, the exact mechanisms for how a memory is formed and stored are still being studied, but there is no set in stone answer for this question yet.  

Drugs are used to resemble chemicals in the brain that are typically produced naturally in the body, but when the body can’t produce those chemicals then drugs are used to mimic those chemicals.  There are many beneficial drugs that an individual can take, that some individuals need to take in order to function on a day to day basis.  For some reasons that can sometimes be unknown, an individual will not be able to produce a naturally producing chemical, causing a chemical imbalance and making it so that the person reacts and does things differently from others.  Like mentioned previously there are many drugs that are used to benefit an individual who may be lacking in the production of certain chemicals, but there are also drugs that can increase the feeling, or mimic what certain chemicals are produced for.  This can cause an individual to become addicted to the feeling and in turn become addicted to a certain drug(s).  The definition of addiction is stated as, “The fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance, thing, or activity.”.  According to an addiction article, “48.5 million (16.7%) Americans (aged 12 or older) battled a substance use disorder in the past year… About 27.2 million Americans, aged 12 or older, reported battling a drug use disorder in the past year.”.  Addiction is a disease that changes the structure and chemistry of the brain, it is also a compulsive use of drugs, despite any cost to health, family, or social standing.  

While researching how drug addiction and drug abuse can pose a challenge for balance in the human body, I wanted to see how it related to Ayurveda.  Ayurveda views drug addiction/ abuse as a disruption of the balance between the 3 doshas, which are; Vata, Pitta, and Kapha.  The 3 doshas represent the primary energies of the body and mind, and their imbalance can lead to various physical and mental health issues, like mentioned previously, which can also include addiction.  When drugs disrupt the Vata, this can lead to anxiety, restlessness, and insomnia.  When drugs disrupt the Pitta from excessive use, this can cause irritability, anger, and inflammation.  When drugs disrupt the Kapha by overindulgence, this can lead to sluggishness, lethargy, and weight gain.  We know that ayurveda is the connection between the mind and the body and we know that drug use can fool the brain into producing the right chemicals that we are needing, which in turn can throw the balance of your physical and mental states.  Extended drug use takes an impact on your physical body, this is something a lot of people notice before anything else. 

 Since the drugs are fooling the brain by producing ‘fake’ chemicals within the body, it will stop production of the natural drug and then you have to rely on the durg to even produce that chemical in the long run.  This is how dangerous addiction and drug usage can be, but we don’t always know why someone is taking these drugs so we can’t always judge. Like we’ve experienced previously there are some good drugs that can be used on a daily basis, and sometimes have to be used on a daily basis for an individual to function in their day to day life.  I know that in my life that the brain isn’t able to produce the amount of certain chemicals I need to function on a day to day basis.  I have to take medication in order to function, and there is a major difference in when I do and don’t take my medications.  Sometimes it gets to the point that my friends and family will ask (if they are aware of my medication) and ask me if I’ve been taking it or if I haven’t.  When I don’t take my medication I feel like something is off in my body.  This is where medication can come into play and have a positive role, this is what is able to help me function as a ‘normal’ human being.  

As we know pathogens are any microbes that cause disease, but each pathogens scope and severity of a disease can differ.  Pathogenesis is the way a disease or disorder develops, it covers everything from the initial exposure to a full pathogen.  The steps that pathogenesis can occur would be in the following 5 steps; exposure, colonization, invasion, damage, and outcome.  Each pathogen is different in its own way, but how each pathogen reacts and causes infection, depends entirely on the hosts’ own immune system and how it reacts to the pathogen itself.  The body as we learn from immunology has its own defense system, but pathogens can bypass those systems and that is how those illnesses come to be within an individual's body. The outcome each different pathogen can have differs with each pathogen.  Some of the outcomes can include recovery, chronic infection, or at times even death. 

Something that we are all familiar with, due to learning about in our other biology classes, is the host-parasite interactions and relationships.  Host-parasitic relationships are ecological interactions where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of another, the host.  Some key phrases that will be used while describing host-parasitic relationships can be the following; parasitism, host, parasite.  Parasitism can be described as a symbiotic relationship, where one organism (typically the parasite) benefits by exploiting another organism (typically the host).  Host is described as the organism that harbors the parasite.  Lastly parasite is described as the organism that lives on or within a host and derives nourishment from it.  As the parasites evolve, and evolve new strategies to corrupt their hosts, but in turn the hosts are also evolving their defenses to resist infection, which concludes in an arms race between the parasite and the host.  Life cycles depend on the parasite and the host themselves, but many parasites can have complicated life cycles that tend to involve multiple hosts.  Having multiple hosts can increase the parasite’s transmission opportunities and allow it to spread to new hosts.  

Microbial interactions can help shape the dynamics of parasite-host relationships, which can greatly influence  the infection process, disease severity, as well as host immune response.  Some of the most known key interactions I found while researching were modulation of host immunity, nutrient competition, alteration of host physiology, direction interactions with parasites, and transmission dynamics.  As I’ve stated above, the microbial interaction explains a complex relationship between the species involved in all reactions.

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