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What broccoli sprouts do for the brain that could treat mental disorders
Schizophrenia is a shockingly frightening disease. For most people, not a single symptom appears before their 20s or 30s and then suddenly their life is marked with hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking.
And, unfortunately, like many of the worst diseases, there’s no cure for the approximately 21 million people suffering from schizophrenia worldwide.
If all of that were not enough, even the drugs used to treat schizophrenia don’t work completely for everyone. They also come with a laundry list of side effects from metabolic problems and an increased risk of heart problems to involuntary movements, restlessness, stiffness and “the shakes.”
Now though, scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center think they may have figured out a way to help restore balance to the brains of schizophrenic patients – something that could help them to better manage their symptoms, and possibly allow doctors to lower their medication dose to reduce those unwanted side effects.
A prescription for better brain chemistry in the produce aisle
The John Hopkins researchers started by looking for differences in brain metabolism between people with schizophrenia and healthy controls.
And, they found that people with schizophrenia have lower levels of the brain chemical glutamate, which is known for its role in sending messages between brain cells and has been linked to depression and schizophrenia.
They also discovered that schizophrenic patients have significantly less of the chemical glutathione in their brain compared to people without the disorder. This wasn’t a surprise to them since glutathione is made of three smaller molecules, one of which is glutamate.
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The team then moved forward with a second study…
They wanted to see if they could shift the balance to get more glutamate stored in the form of glutathione to possibly combat the symptoms and stop the patterns of schizophrenia at their source.
They used a chemical called sulforaphane, which is found in broccoli sprouts and is known to turn on a gene that makes more of the enzyme that sticks glutamate with another molecule to make glutathione.
And, guess what…
It worked!
Related: How nourishing the brain could heal mental illness
When they treated rat brain cells with schizophrenia, the researchers were able to slow the speed their nerve cells fired at to send fewer messages. The researchers say this pushed the brain cells to behave less like the pattern found in brains with schizophrenia.
“We are thinking of glutathione as glutamate stored in a gas tank,” says Thomas Sedlak, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “If you have a bigger gas tank, you have more leeway on how far you can drive, but as soon as you take the gas out of the tank it’s burned up quickly. We can think of those with schizophrenia as having a smaller gas tank.”
And, the chemical found in broccoli sprouts just might give people with schizophrenia the larger gas tank they need.
Possible help for other mental disorders
The researchers didn’t stop there either…
They wanted to see if that chemical in broccoli sprouts could change the glutathione levels in healthy people’s brains so that it could eventually help people cope with other types of mental disorders.
Related: 12+ ways to boost your master antioxidant
The researchers had volunteers take two capsules with 100 micromoles daily of sulforaphane in the form of broccoli sprout extract for seven days.
And, the results were impressive…
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After seven days, there was an approximately 30 percent increase in average glutathione levels in the subjects’ brains.
Although they do warn that more research is necessary to find the right dose of broccoli sprout extract to help in patients with schizophrenia and that patients should consult their physicians before trying the supplement, Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Johns Hopkins Schizophrenia Center had this to say, “It’s possible that future studies could show sulforaphane to be a safe supplement to give people at risk of developing schizophrenia as a way to prevent, delay or blunt the onset of symptoms.”
So, while it may be too soon to know without a doubt whether broccoli sprouts hold the key to overcoming schizophrenia and other mental disorders for good, it’s nice to know that something 100 percent natural and healthy holds such promise.
Editor’s note: Hi friend, if you’re visiting from Facebook, could you do us a favor and share this post? We’re sure an awful lot of people could benefit from this information. But for whatever reason, Facebook will only allow our posts to reach a small fraction of our more than 400,000 Facebook followers. Seems like censorship but they call it algorithms. Thank you!
Sources:
- Broccoli sprout compound may restore brain chemistry imbalance linked to schizophrenia — Johns Hopkins Medicine
By Dr. Adria Schmedthorst
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