August 19, 2009 - In this Issue

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Red Yeast Rice to Lower Cholesterol
by Terry Grossman, M.D.

Red yeast rice lowers LDL cholesterol in patients who cannot tolerate statins, reports the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Some 60 patients who had discontinued statins owing to muscle pain were randomized to receive red yeast rice supplements (1800 mg twice daily) or placebo for 24 weeks. (Red yeast rice contains naturally occurring lovastatin.) All patients also participated in a 12-week lifestyle change program focused on nutrition, exercise, and relaxation techniques.

Mean LDL cholesterol levels at 12 and 24 weeks fell by 27% and 21% respectively with red yeast rice, and by 6% and 9%, respectively, with placebo. The differences between groups were statistically significant. The supplement appeared safe in terms of new-onset muscle pain, as well as creatinine phosphokinase (CPK) and liver enzyme levels.

The authors acknowledge the study's limitations, including the small sample size and short duration. Still, they conclude that their intervention "may provide a therapeutic lipid-lowering option for the large cohort of patients" with statin-associated muscle pain.

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Don't Believe Everything a Doctor Says on TV (especially about autism)!!!
by Michael Catalano, M.D.

Imagine you are a physician, you work for MSNBC and they ask you on their Today show to comment on a new report about gastro-intestinal illness and autism. Imagine you give your review of the report and you mis-state what the report said!

That’s what happened last week on the Today show, when Dr Nancy Snyderman, their chief medical editor, described a new report in the prestigious journal, Pediatrics. Dr Snyderman said that the report showed once and for all that there is NO link between gut issues and autism (see the internet link below to view the 2-minute Today segment with Dr Snyderman).

An alert mother of one of our autism patients saw the segment and told us about it. I listened to it and then looked up the actual report which Dr Snyderman claimed to review. In fact, the authors of the report did NOT reach the conclusions she stated: they said that autistic children DID have more constipation and limited food preferences than other kids and that more work needed to be done to determine if their gut symptoms were more frequent and/or more severe than other kids. AND there was an editorial about the report in the same issue of the journal, which said that there more work needed to be done to answer the question of a gut-brain connection in autism. Dr Snyderman never even mentioned the editorial!

I have written to the Today show to question Dr Snyderman’s objectivity and to challenge her accuracy and to challenge them to broadcast a clarification of her misleading review. I included her actual quotes and compared them to the contradictory quotes of the report authors and the editorial writers. I copied that email to the Autism Research Institute (DAN!) and they have forwarded it to their email subscriber list of 5,000 people. Since then, several people in the autism community have told me that Dr Snyderman has previously expressed longstanding opinions against the biomedical approach to understanding and treating autism.

The Today show and Dr Snyderman did not do their jobs well. At FMI, we know from our ongoing biomedical treatment of many autistic patients that gut issues are indeed part of autism and that their mental and behavioral symptoms get better, a lot better, when their gut issues are addressed and resolved.

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Lithium for Alzheimer's Prevention
by Lolita Hanks, FNP-C

Lithium is a mineral that is found in the table of elements although it is more commonly associated with Bipolar disorder. In 2007 researchers at UCLA found by using a MRI to study the brains of those who were on Lithium and found that this group had a 15% volume increase in their grey matter found by the MRI imaging .

Another study in The Lancet found that lithium had the ability to both protect and renew brain cells, 8 out of 10 individuals who took lithium showed an average 3 percent increase in brain grey matter in four weeks . That does not sound like much, but it amounts to approximately billions of new brain cells.

Excitotoxins namely, glutamate (MSG hidden in majority of processed foods) and aspartame (Nutrasweet®) cause brain neurons to die by exciting the neurons to death (avoid these neurotoxins as much as possible). Lithium can also help protect against this damage .

Lithium it follows may be a good adjunct to your current anti-aging, wellness protocol to prevent Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s as it also blocks glutamate activity . As we age our brains decrease in size. Lithium also has the ability to add new neurons. Typical Bipolar patients take a minimum prescribed dose of 300mg/day. Low doses of Lithium 5-10 mg a day are sufficient to get a good response and can be found in a natural health food store. Lithium may also be beneficial for those suffering from fibromyalgia , low level depression and as a preventative measure if there is a family history of alcoholism (15mg/day) . Always take some flaxseed oil as well as a vitamin E supplement while utilizing Lithium.

1. http://www.physorg.comnews95351363.html : April 9, 2007:C. Neurology, Sept. 9, 2008; vol 71: pp 826-832.News release, American Academy of Neurology.

© 2008 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved.

2. http://www.wrightnewsletter.com/articles/nah_2003s5hk/nah_200308.htm; pg. 1

3. Shigeyuki Nonaka,* Christopher J. Hough,† and De-Maw Chuang: Chronic lithium treatment robustly protects neurons in the central nervous system against excitotoxicity by inhibiting N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor-mediated calcium influx: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1998 March 3; 95(5): 2642–2647.

4. ibid

5. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1452465&blobtype=pdf

6. http://www.wrightnewsletter.com/articles/nah_20044gji/nah_200407.html

 

Telephone Consultations with Frontier Medical/Grossman Wellness Center

A significant number of our patients do not live in Denver, and, in fact, many of them do not even live in the United States. If you have a health issue you’d like to discuss with Dr. Grossman, Dr. Catalano, or Karen Kurtak, our nutritionist/ traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, and can’t come to Denver, consider scheduling a telephone consultation with one of us. For more information or to schedule a telephone consultation, please call us at 303.233.4247 or via email at info@fmiclinic.com

 

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