AMEN Australia 2014: From Bended Knee to Bedside

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Plenary

Phil Mills

Christ’s Method of Training Medical Evangelists

Fred Hardinge

Essential Elements of Effective Health Ministry

Christ’s Method of Medical Evangelism- House Calls

Ross Grant

Treating Oxidative Stress in Dementia: A Role for Lifestyle Medicine

Is Balanced Health Ministry Possible?

Christ’s Method of Medical Evangelism- Visual Impairment

And 1 of the things that we do and that we're focused on in doing in our research institute there at the hospital is to be able to provide resources, both conceptually, intellectually, as well as we hope practically and there's a couple of things that we're working on in relation to particularly what we call a wellness profile for being able to give to GPs to be able to use a lot more efficiently.

But essentially that concept of where lifestyle and everything fits in.

Now I know in a clinical practice you're getting along and using a lot of techniques which you've been taught, et cetera, But 1 of the things that I like to remind even my clinical colleagues at Sydney Hospital, Sydney Adventist Hospital, is that nothing happens clinically without there first being a shift biochemically.

And we really need to know what's happening behind the scenes in order to be most efficient about how we apply.

So in other words, taking a medical science approach.

Now what I'm hoping to do this morning is give you a little bit of an insight into potentially 1 of What is, I think, 1 of the most ineffective, or the areas where we are actually in terms of current medicine, where we have probably the least effective impact, and that's clinically.

And so if we can understand that a little bit behind, and that's dementia, Still 1 of the top 3 causes of death in Australia.

So if we can understand a little bit how it is produced and then see whether or not lifestyle, which of course we're privileged to have that perspective from over 150 years ago, so we are looking in the right direction, but let's look and see whether or not lifestyle might even have an impact in 1 of these huge areas where there's literally hundreds of millions of dollars, in fact there are billions of dollars if you include all of the drug trials, etc, that are going in trying to work out how can we stop dementia.

And in fact the answer may be a lot closer than we think.

And that way I can improve on it by possibly not doing it again.

So treating, now this concept of oxidative stress, I know some of you have heard it before.

I'll give a little bit more detail about that as we go through, because we think that that's actually that, if you like, there's lots of things that can contribute to it, but this is probably that point, that final coalescing point in the biochemistry that we think that ultimately you end up with the changes to the body.

We're getting a progressive and irreversible loss of neurons.

That's not going to be a surprise to most of you.

From specific regions of the brain affecting cognition.

And at least in the neurodegenerative dementias, There are types of dementias where you're just getting them not functioning so well.

But we're actually talking about loss of neurons themselves.

And while I'm not going to show it here for time, you'll actually see parts of the brain that are literally becoming smaller because of the fact that you get lots of neuronal loss.

So there's lots of different types, vascular dementia, infectious diseases, AIDS-related dementia complex.

In fact, I did a lot of work around that in my PhD.

But then Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, frontotemporal dementia, Crooksworth-Yakob, Huntington's, mitochondrial encephalopathies, et cetera.

Lots of things actually result in this type of thing.

There's no exam on this, so you can just relax and enjoy it.

But really, the dementias from a variety of those things, and I've put them essentially in order, although AIDS dementia complex is not there, but certainly stroke links through into Alzheimer's, et cetera.

Over 300, 000 Australians currently affected, predicted to be 900, 000 by 2050.

Each week there's more than 1, 700 new cases of dementia, about 1 person every 6 minutes.

That's not bad, even in a country like Australia which is not very big.

Now I've seen figures, it just depends on who actually puts these figures out.

Others have talked about around $4 billion.

And the expectation is that that's going to go up in a huge amount by not too far away, a couple of decades.

If you have a look at what's causing the main cause of this, it's the Alzheimer's type dementia, but then frontotemporal dementia.

There's a lot of similarities between these, but I'll focus mostly on Alzheimer's disease.

So basically the main point of all of that little bit is that dementia is a big problem, correct?

And certainly for those of you in general practice, I mean it's 1 of the things that your patients, particularly the older ones, are very concerned about.

So they're worried about getting dementia, Alzheimer's or as they say, Alzheimer's disease.

And we know the clinical presentation, it's classic, it's 1 that most people know.

Gradual loss of short-term memory, problems finding or speaking the right word.

I mean, so far as we go down this list, it seems like most of us have got this.

Inability to recognize subjects, forgetting how to use simple, ordinary things such as a pencil, forgetting to turn off the stove, close windows or lock doors, and mood and personality disorders depending on, ultimately, the global dementia that occurs.

And look, there's great stories, but 1 of the best I can remember is a particular gentleman who'd been given a car by his daughter.

And he took this new car, a little Ford Focus, And he drove it out somewhere, forgot where he was going, forgot how to get home, so he parked it with the key still in the ignition into somebody's driveway and then went wandering off, not sure exactly where he was intending to wander to, But he went wandering off.

Eventually the police found him and took him home, but nobody knew where his car was.

And so the daughter's going, Dad, you had a car.

Nobody could find the car, except 2 weeks later the police actually found the car where the owner, well, the person who had owned the house that he'd driven into must have thought that they got a Christmas present and was actually driving the car around.

Now I do wonder about possibly some of the morals of the person who did it, but in any case This is obviously where somebody has significant cognitive impairment of the Alzheimer's type.

Now we're not going to go into this in too much, but I want to talk about the fact just briefly that they're what we call cholinergic neurons.

Some of you will know what I mean by that.

But essentially you've got these neurons and they use different, you know, when 1 neuron connects with the next 1, it actually releases a little chemical that goes across this synaptic cleft and it then excites the next 1 and away you go.

And these happen in fractions of a second.

You would know that in depression the parts of the area associated with that, then there's the serotonin bit, right?

And if you're going to the feel-goods, it's sort of like dopamine is 1 of the main ones.

It's also those reward pathways for people who get hooked on things.

Whereas this type 1, it actually uses acetylcholine.

Now you might know that 1, acetylcholine is also used in what we call the neuromuscular junction, so actually to activate muscles.

But it's the cholinergic neurons that start to die off first.

Now the reason why I'm telling you that is that when we come to the treatments, so the current therapies.

Now, does anybody know, there will be plenty of people who knows about dopamine.

Which one's dying off in Parkinson's disease?

So of course, you've got the dopaminergic neurons.

And what is the treatment for Parkinson's currently?

Essentially trying to increase dopamine within that part of the brain.

Is it actually stopping the neurons from dying?

It's just increasing the amount of dopamine so that the neurons that are left have to work harder.

If there's not enough people actually to help them out, the people that are left work a lot harder.

But is that treatment actually stopping the Parkinson's disease?

It Stops the symptoms, sometimes quite effectively and for a few years, but actually doesn't stop the death of the neurons.

So actually you're not preventing the Parkinsonians.

Well, It's exactly the same with Alzheimer's.

So these cholinesterase inhibitors, things like tacrin, et cetera, these are cholinesterase inhibitors.

Series

Plenary

Treating Oxidative Stress in Dementia: A Role for Lifestyle Medicine

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Track 1 Seminars

Tools for Soul-Winning Health Expos, Part 6

37m

Breakout Session 6

Growing Transplants

1h 16m

In Due Season

40m

The Judge, the Widow and the Adversary

50m

Living in Denial

59m

Its Time For a NEWSTART

53m

The Cost of Discipleship- Part 1

44m

Jonathan Walter Weekend

Driven by a Higher Loyalty - Step aside, Star Trek

1h 2m

Community Health

False Prophets of Health Ministry

21m

Market Gardening Track

A Balancing Act

59m

His Way is in the Sanctuary

10. The Bible’s Foundational Prophecy

57m

The Mount of Blessings

Light of the World

40m

Sound Doctrine