Blog Suspension

As my recent sorry nonposting should suggest, I’ve had to have to
suspend my blogging indefinitely. It’s because we’ve had a kid.

There is some good news – the kid was created via PGD, and has tested HD-free.
It wasn’t cheap, but it did work. We are deeply grateful to those who
worked on the team that made this possible.

Before he came, I had naive hopes about the compatibility of
blogging and having a baby. There are, after all, baby-bloggers. But
I can’t seem to make it happen. They’re made of sterner stuff
than I am; I couldn’t even get this post out the door for months.

At some point before he makes it to 18 years, I should be able to get
back to this….

Thanks readers, and I wish you the best of luck with your anti=HDly
daily battle.

Sorry about not letting you know faster.

Some More Interesting Neurogenesis Research

I’ve been looking at neurogenesis-related blogposts today, and found
the following reference to an interesting article appeared. It’s
actually a year old.

Part of it is the kind of wide-eyed thing tech magazines do too often,
about Elizabeth Gould, the woman who effectively discredited the idea the
neurogenesis doesn’t happen in the adult brain.

The article also talks alot about drugs shown to encourage
neurogenesis. Apparently, antidepressants work by encouraging
neurogenesis rather than the mechanism previously posited. Several
drugs targeted to optimize neurogenesis are being researched.

According to the article, one drug is being targeted to Parkinson’s,
secretively called sNN0031. Mice with Parkinson’s saw a reversal of
symptoms in weeks. That was rat models and Parkinson’s, though, of
course. So, still a ways to go.

Shyness Apology

I want to apologize for my lack of response to comments. Although it
also feels good, there’s something terrifying about HD-blogging. It’s
literally a deadly enemy, so talking about it is talking about death
as well.

That’s made me alot shyer even than normal. I do post to another blog
regularly, and think that blog’d agree I’m alot friendlier there.
Hopefully I can get used to to HD-blogging a bit and get better at
posting and responding.

I do appreciate the comments and encouragement, though. Thanks!

Problems: Welcome To The Cutting Edge

To set expectations appropriately, I want to explain problems and
possible or likely limitations of biking. After all, this amounts to
an experimental treatment, and you can count on that sort of thing
having plenty of problems and drawbacks.

The worse problem might be the vast numbers of falls at the start.

Statistics show that bikers have lots of falls when they start, and
that they tail off rapidly (exponentially, for the engineers). Well,
I’d done lots of biking in college, a decade and a half ago. Though I
could still balance a bike, time and HD combined to deny me the memories
of how to ride well. I had to start that curve from very near the
newbie part, meaning many crashes. Plus, the movement problems
inherent in HD made it even worse.

Fortunately, one fear did not come to pass – when I was still driving
cars, I crashed routinely into other cars because I wasn’t paying
attention, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem. The only time a car
has hit me was when I was going the opposite direction from traffic up
a sidewalk, where turning drivers often don’t look. I stopped doing
that, and it’s been over a year now. I believe that it’s because of
the flow of new neurons, because I’m much more vulnerable to falling
in the first five minutes of a ride.

The entire progression is in a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward
progression. I do feel like more of my skills have gotten better than
worse, but I’m always seeing some skills getting worse again. There
is an appearance to me that physical skills are likelier to fall back,
but I might just be looking harder at them.

The population of people who have reversed their neural losses via
exercise is entirely unstudied in any research literature. We are on
the cutting edge of research. Generally speaking, long-term practical
problems limitations are as yet unknown. Although my memory so far
seems to be getting better, I do still fear that, even if I make it
back to a more normal brain cell count, I will continue to see
noteworthy memory and skill degrations of the kind I see in my
inevitable step back from the two steps forward. After all, even if
I’m gaining more neurons than losing, there will always be serious
turnover in neurons until a true cure becomes available.

On the third hand, I might learn to better learn how to handle the
losses, especially with plenty of neurons. I’ve started using more
mnemonic devices in the past year, for example. That’s just
speculation, though – despite my efforts, so far I can’t remember many
friends’ personal situations and problems when talking to them.

What’s Working For Me?

Long, daily exercise, in the form of biking, is the biggest help for me.
My experience is that exercise must be significantly
aerobic to help. Long periods of weightlifting, walking,
or even dancing(!) do alot less. If I’m not breathing hard, it’s not
helping.

The biking isn’t easy – I get more than my share of bruises, since
of course, well, HD has its effects on physical skills. I’ve had to
make a conscious choice to put up with them in exchange for real hope
of cutting down on the disease’s worst bad effects.

I’m currently taking and have tried many other things, in the hopes
of getting other mechanisms on my side, but really, the biking seems
to me to have made by far the biggest difference. If I’d never taken
the other things, I suspect I’d only be modestly worse. If I hadn’t
biked, I’d be getting too stupid to blog effectively by now. I’d
spend alot more time depressed, and be falling more.

The neurogenerative effect of exercise is probably what makes
the biking work for me – exercise has been shown to result in neuron
creation. But it also helps with depression, both directly via a
regular stream of endomorphins, and indirectly because I feel my
situation is getting better rather than worse.

Why the bike in particular? Well, it’s aerobic exercise. It
serves as transport, which is helpful, since like many others with
neurodegenerative diseases, I can’t safely drive; I can safely
bike, though. Finally, the bike gives more physical support than
running; I believe I’d have even more bruises if I ran instead.

Biking appears to me to be safer than driving for me because it
generates new neurons as I go, making up for lost ones, and letting me
adapt quickly to biking and to lost neurons. Most of my falls have
been just starting out. Interestingly, one skill I feel I’ve acquired
has been learning to use those new neurons as quickly as possible to
make my ride safe. I really had many more falls before that.

I’m wondering if I might eventually be able to drive safely again if I
make a practice of never driving unless I’ve biked enough that day to
remediate the previous day’s brain cell loss. But I’m not inclined
to even try until I get rather closer to my starting neuronal levels.

Daily Race With Death

Every day, I try and outrace Death. Every day, Death takes some
of my brain cells away. My effort is about winning a race with
Death almost every day to at least replace my dead brain cells,
and especially over time. Death has a huge headstart on me, and
took alot of cells before I got in the race, so I have to race
hard to get them back in reasonable time.

In the early days of this race, I used to think alot about scenes
from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a film that featured
racing scenes with an elaborately costumed Death. After finishing
my biking for the day, I’d take off my bike helmet, think of
pulling ahead of that black, skeletal figure, and think, “Nyah,
nyah!”.

So why the race? Well, my daily dose of dead brain cells comes
from Huntington’s Disease, which is a kind of disease called
neurodegenerative. That means lots of my brain cells die
every day; one WAG on the web somewhere placed the daily neuron
death level in the millions.

So what can I do about this? Well, I get on my bike every day and
stay there a while. At least 17-20 minutes, preferably over an hour.
Recent research has shown that exercise can lead to neural growth.
Neurodegenerative diseases were thought to be hopeless until
recently because neurons were thought not to ever grow, but in fact
exercise and certain substances (highly present in blueberries!)
have been shown to cause neurons to grow.

Mind you, using this to help with damage from neurodegenerative
diseases is very much experimental. You can think of this as
a lab rat’s blog. I’m going to give the lab rat’s point-of-view
of using exercise for neurodegenerative therapy.