The TRANSCEND book is split into two main parts: the problem and the plan. In the first part (the problem) the authors discuss which major problem areas in the health of a human (brain, hormones, heart, etc.), while in the second they discuss their nine step plan to handling those problem areas.

I was happy that the first chapter was about the brain. I feel that brain health is an area that is overlooked too often compared to other areas of human health, and I think that is often the case because your brain is the least noticeable part of your body (you live in your mind, but your brain has few detectable activities as opposed to others like your moving hand or beating heart).

The main theme of the chapter is the fact that the adult brain's plasticity has become a widely accepted idea proven by many examples of people transferring certain brain functions from one part of the brain to another, and close microscopic monitoring of brain neural cells actively growing and establishing connections. I have worked in the past with a dynamic well known inventor who had part of her brain surgically removed. I have also worked closely with a physician who specialized in working with patients who have had part of their brains either damaged or surgically removed and has written a book about the remarkable (and often complete) recovery of many of his patients.

After getting the myth of a static brain that stops growing throughout adulthood out of the way, the discussion turns into how to prevent the brain from aging and maintain its health well into old age. The first (and I think hardest) approach is to continue exercising your brain just like you exercise other parts of your body. It is important to exercise your logical brain, emotional brain and motor skills. Reading, learning/playing a musical instrument, intellectually stimulating discussions,and  playing sports are some of the ways that can be done. But each person should find what works for them as long as they maintain a good balance and engage the different parts of their brain.

Another aspect of maintaining the health of your brain is by providing your body with supplements of materials that the body stops making after a certain stage in your life. Those are natural materials that exist in your body and luckily in nature as well. At first I was weary, but the list really makes a lot of sense and I have already started taking almost all of those supplements. For example phosphatidylcholine is a substance that your body stops making enough of at some point (and it is hard to get enough of it from food, even tough it exists in some of the foods we eat), but that is a main building block of your cells' membrane. Once your body stops having enough of it, it starts using other similar materials that cause your cells to lose their flexibility and eventually stop functioning properly or break up. There are few other supplements which I won't mention here, but I'm researching the most cost effective ways to obtain them and will write more about that later.

The last aspect of brain health maintenance discussed in this chapter is sleep. Clinical studies of the importance of sleep and a discussion of the process of sleep and how it helps the brain replenish and rewire. I spent many years of my life sleep deprived, mostly because I had so much I wanted to do and I thought that the best thing I could do was to give myself few more hours in a day to do them. It took me a long time to realize that those 3-4 hours often caused me to cut my productivity over the other 16 hours of the day by a much larger percentage than what I gained. And in addition, I enjoyed doing them much more when I was well rested.

This journal entry is getting long, so I wont' discuss other areas of this chapter such as addiction and depression, but this was an amazing chapter. It both got me excited about reading the rest of the book and gave me real and practical things to do.

See you next chapter.
K

Creative Commons photo (of a lime jello brain!) by Elisabeth Feldman.

As I read through the TRANSCEND book by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, I want to use this journal to summarize the most important learnings. Mostly for my own record, but hopefully for the benefits of others who are reading my journal.

The book TRANSCEND is the practical version of Kurzweil and Grossman's theory on longevity, namely that if you live long enough, you will live forever. While the idea sounds fantastical and futuristic, the premise is really very practical and grounded. Medicine and health management are growing from being a process of discovery into becoming a process of engineering. Scientists are spending less effort on "discovering" cures and more on "engineering" them. And since human engineering technologies have the observed property of exponential growth, then we are close to the point where advancement in science will surpass the rate at which our bodies age.

The book is applicable and extremely useful regardless of whether you agree with its premise or not. It is a guided journey through understanding the most common challenges that a human body will face (in very practical and scientific terms) and what tools you have within reach to deal with them.

But what appeals to me even more in this book, is the focus on the need to take charge of ones own health. The need to research and better understand, what illness is, what causes it and what can be done outside of the doctor's office, in our daily lives, to prevent or deal with it. And while some of the recommendations could be labeled as alternative, all of them are based on well explained science and there is a strong emphasis on "Talking to your doctor" (which is represented by T, the first letter in the mnemonic TRANSCEND).

I am enjoying going through this book tremendously and have already started applying many of its recommendations. If you are interested in learning more about my journey with it come back and check my journal, and even better, watch my journal here on medhelp or subscribe its RSS feed.

The drug uses a material called methylthioninium chloride to prevent the accumulation of a protein associated with brain cell death. The drug went through initial human trials and showed an 81% decline in the disease's progression.

It is scheduled for wider trials in 2009 and is planned for production in 2012 if all goes well.

Here's the BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7525115.stm

DNA editing is often touted as a possible cure for many genetic illnesses. DNA being the blueprint of your body happily sits in every cell of the 50 or so trillion cells that form your body. That is why the idea of changing all DNA in your body to cure a genetic disease is still more science fiction than reality.

But new research claims that some form of DNA editing might help us get immune to AIDS. That is possible because HIV does not infect any cell in your body, but a specific kind of white cell (called a T-cell) that lives in your blood. White blood cells are one of the main building blocks of your immune system. The way HIV hurts its patients is by attacking those white cells and making the body vulnerable to the attack of many other illnesses that your body is otherwise perfectly capable of fending off.

The fact that those white cells are in your blood stream means that they are considerably easier to replace than any other kind of cell in your body. The new research claims that a mutation that renders a small percentage of humans immune to AIDS could be introduced into your own blood cells, which are then injected in you to multiply and replace the older white cells.

This sounds like a very promising approach. Not just because it is possible that it could succeed, but because it can be applied retroactively to cure people who already have the disease and not just to immunize people who are not already infected.

Here is the article for the curious: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/gene-editing-co.html

Khaled