Brain Inflammation, Beyond Brain Fog

This one problem, neurological inflammation, explains why some people continue suffering day after day over time even though they’ve seen many doctors and ‘tried everything.’

People with this process going on can be experiencing many different symptoms ranging from brain fog to fatigue, difficulty thinking, mood problems, focus problems, concentration problems, vertigo, dizziness, migraines, other headaches, and more.

This is the 2nd post in a multiple post series about brain based inflammatory problems. The 1st post covers an overview of this neuro-inflammatory process, be sure to check it out.

In future posts we’ll build on these concepts and talk about things you can do to help improve this serious problem.

Here’s the big issue with Brain Inflammation….

If that brain inflammation is not properly addressed, then it can progress from mild to chronic to permanent and even to neurological autoimmunity with ongoing destruction of your brain resulting in devastating problems for you. This would be worst case scenario.

This is a progressive process that can worsens over time if not properly addressed.

This is like everything else, it’s better to address problems earlier rather than later in the process.

There isn’t a specific medical diagnosis of ‘neurological inflammation.’

In fact, there isn’t really even a medical diagnosis for excess inflammation in our bodies, even though both are fairly common.

They are also both well known to cause very serious problems.

This is because the term inflammation is non-specific.

It doesn’t tell us why there is inflammation and there are many different causes.

The concept of neurological inflammation is based on research that’s been coming out recently by leading people in neurology and immunology.

It’s a very rapidly growing relatively newer field of study that the average health care practitioner probably won’t hear about for decades.

Importantly, you can’t just take meds like an anti-inflammatory or a steroid to fix brain inflammation.

It doesn’t really work and over time there is an high probability that it may make the problem worse if you do not change what is driving the inflammation… and that’s part of the problem.

Inflammation is an important function of our immune system.

It’s necessary. It can also get out of control. It’s bad enough in a joint or somewhere else in our bodies. In our brain, it can be devastating as you’re about to see.

Our brains have neurons that we all know about and immune cells which most people don’t know much about.

Immune cells make up the vast majority of the brain’s cells.

90% of brain cells are these immune cells while only 10% of our brain cells are neurons.

This one fact tells you exactly how important they are for brain function.

These little cells support the neurons so they can function how they need to function.

They can also change in response to trauma or many different stressors to permanently become little attack cells that destroy brain cells.

Here’s how that happens, we have immune cells in the brain that are designed to move around, help neurons work, and clean up problems.

They’re like little spiders wandering around staying busy which is kind of creepy when you see it.

Anyway, what happens is that we have some type of event like…

• Breathing problems ranging from asthma to chronic bronchitis, emphysema, COPD, and more
• Hitting our heads (that can cause a concussion / traumatic brain injury which happens to varying degrees in car accidents, sports, falls, etc),
• A major life stress,
• Gut problems,
• Reactions to food proteins (3 most common are gluten from grains, dairy, and soy),
• An infection,
• High blood sugar/insulin levels,
• Losing oxygen (anemia, asthma, emphysema, copd, pneumonia,…),
• Or getting older, among other things.

So there are 2 processes causing this, either a chronic problem over time and/or a sudden stressor.

The chronic problems like diabetes/blood sugar problems, gut issues, food sensitivities, breathing problems, low grade infections, ongoing body inflammation, and aging generally lead to a progressive brain inflammation going from mild and intermittent to chronic then primed followed by autoimmune.

A sudden stressor like a concussion, a major infection, or a sudden chemical exposure can jump right to activating or in some cases priming the brain’s immune system very, very quickly.

For example, within just a few minutes of hitting our head our gut barrier and our blood brain barrier opens up to start to change our immune system’s activation which is designed to help clean up the damage.

Opening these barriers does have other potentially very serious consequences though including letting other stuff get through the barrier that normally could not (like certain food proteins).

The immune system in the brain goes into action when this blood brain barrier is breached.

One of the serious, permanent consequences in some cases is the activation or ‘priming‘ of immune cells shown below…

When these immune cells are activated they change their shape and their function.

This is a critically important process for your healthcare provider to understand if you are suffering with these problems and it doesn’t matter if your health care provider is a medical doctor, doctor of chiropractic, physical therapist, or another provider type.

We’ll continue this series with another blog post.