Antidepressants Blog

Almost all the fats that we eat in our food are nothing but triglycerides. This is probably the other name for oils. Triglycerides also form a part of the blockage.Tri means three and glycerides comes from glycerol. Triglycerides is a combination of one glycerol molecule with three fats (or fatty acids). In other words, three chains of fat molecules (units) when attached to one glycerol can constitute triglycerides. These three chains of fatty acids, depending on the number of hydrogen atoms that they contain, can be saturated, mono-unsaturated or poly-unsaturated in hydrogen.The understanding is pretty simple: if there are thirty slots for hydrogen in a fatty acid and all of them are filled up, it will be called saturated (with hydrogen) fatty acid. Most of the hydrogenated fats push hydrogen in high pressure into the fatty acid molecules to make the fat saturated. They take poly-unsaturated fat and before selling, convert them into saturated fat by adding hydrogen.On the other hand, if one hydrogen is missing in the fatty acid chain it ceases to be saturated. Since it is unsaturated by one hydrogen only it is called mono-unsaturated fat. It is something like 29 hydrogen atoms instead of 30 (as in saturated fat). That makes very little difference.Thirdly, if more than one hydrogen is missing in the fatty acid chain (like 28 out of 30), this fat becomes poly-unsaturated. Literally and structurally there is hardly any difference between these three types of fats. They look alike as well. Even from the heart disease formation angle all of them contribute almost equally to the blockage formation. While one does 90% harm, the other two do 88% and 86% harm.Almost all kinds of oil is 100% fat of any combination of these three kinds of fat. It is through the bad and unethical advertisements for promoting their products that the oil companies have created an impression that triglycerides are good for the heart disease (which is interpreted by the patients as ‘helping to cure heart disease’). This is not a fact. I have given a chart of average content of oils for patients’ use. Choose if you can.The normal level of triglycerides in the blood is 60 to 160mg/ 100ml. It’s recommended less than 120 mg/l00ml. More than 160 mg is associated with increased incidence of heart disease.Small amounts of triglycerides are manufactured in the liver. All food items also contain some invisible oils also. These two combined can make up for the minimum amount of oil-requirement of the body.*13/283/5*

Is BDD more common in women or men? Is it different in the two sexes? We don’t have definite answers to these questions, but what we do know is intriguing.It’s often assumed that BDD is much more common in women. Aren’t women more focused on their looks than men are? And doesn’t society place a particularly high premium on attractiveness in women? Indeed, research findings from the general population indicate that more women than men are unhappy with how they look.Several studies of BDD have contained more women than men. Several others, however, have had as many men as women or even more men than women. Somewhat more women than men (60% vs 40%) have participated in my BDD studies. It’s unclear to what extent this ratio reflects the true gender ratio of BDD in the community. It may be harder for men to acknowledge that they have BDD, and men seem less likely than women to participate in BDD studies, especially treatment studies. Thus, the gender ratio may be more equal than these percentages suggest.In a study done in France of more than 600 patients with obsessive compulsive disorder and similar disorders (e.g., trichotillomania), men and women were nearly equally represented among the 151 patients with BDD. A number of years ago, I reviewed all the published cases of BDD that I could find in the English-language literature as well as a large number published in other languages. In these published cases, the sex ratio was approximately 1.25 female to 1.0 male.These research findings can’t give us as valid an estimate of BDD’s sex ratio as we’d like. What’s needed to determine it with greater certainty are large-scale surveys, in which the prevalence and sex ratio of BDD are determined in thousands of people in various settings, including the community. The studies I just noted were relatively small and could have various biases. In the meantime, until such surveys are done, we can be certain that BDD affects both women and men.*147\204\8*

There are pathways in the nervous system which help us appreciate our environment, whether by sight, touch, or hearing. Each sense organ can be regarded as an extension, or the sensitive area, of a nerve which is linked to the brain. In the case of the eyes, the light-sensitive cells in the back of the eyeball (retina) are linked together in specific patterns which are then transmitted by the optic nerves to a relay station at the base of the brain. In lower animals, much organization of incoming information is carried out here but, in man and other primates, most of the processing occurs in the grey matter of the brain, the cortex. Here, the shape perceived is compared with stored information and recognition occurs when the pattern is matched with memory. A label is supplied by an area of the brain concerned with memory and we have a conscious appreciation of what the object is. A similar process occurs with the recognition of sounds but, in this case, different areas of the brain are involved.Touch (tactile sensation) is different in that the impulses have to travel a greater distance to the brain up the spinal cord (except in the case of sensation on the face). The other varieties of sensation besides touch include temperature, superficial pain, and deep pain. Impulses travel along nerve fibres from sensitive structures in the skin to the spinal cord where they relay with long nerve fibres grouped together. These travels to the brain where two things happen: the first is that the sensation is localized, because only that group of nerve fibres in the brain concerned solely with sensation from the specifically activated area is stimulated; secondly, other areas of the brain go into a state of expectancy, a general alerting reaction. Because of this activation (which can be measured electrically) there is an increased flow of blood to the nerve cells. Complex patterns of skin stimulation can be analyzed in much the same way as patterns of light and sound perceived by eyes and ears.The structures in the skin or other tissues which receive painful stimuli are of a specific type, and are different from those sensitive to touch and temperature. Pain sensation is served by two types of nerve fibre, fast and slow, each of which transmits pain of a different character: the fast fibre transmits discrete, sharp pain whilst the slow fibre produces dull and diffuse pain. Slow-conducting fibres also transmit the sensation of itch; this is the reason why scratching, in other words, blocking the itch sensation by pain, is efficacious.
*17/152/5*