Mental control of blood sugar levels is a reality for diabetes patients

June 25, 11:25 PMDiabetes ExaminerRobert Scheinman

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Diabetes Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Dancing bear fetish carving: Jeff Tsalabutie

It is extraordinarily clear that the mind plays some role in the amount of sugar in your blood stream. The important question is…how much? Consider that common companion to our daily ritual: stress. Your stress increases your blood sugar levels. Now stress begins in the mind. It came about as that ancient response to danger of the most direct and physical sort. If you are being chased by a grizzly bear you had better be stressed! What sort of physiological processes would we like to have turned on and what things turned off during our tag game with the grizzly? The heart rate and the rate of breathing accelerate. The blood vessels constrict. That seems like some pretty useful stuff as it will increase our muscle output. Processes of digestion as well as other irrelevant activities (such as the processing of peripheral vision) stop. You become quite focused on breaking that 8 minute mile. Most importantly, you begin to mobilize sugar – lots of it. Since our grizzly is more contextual, the sugar does not fuel our muscles but rather it sits and sweetens our urine.

One of the most obvious connections between the mind and the body is voluntary muscle movement. Motoneurons are connected to muscles throughout the body. Move those muscles and a couple of really interesting things happen. You begin to de-stress (exercise is a fantastic anti-stress therapy) and your muscles open up little glucose shaped holes to slurp up that sugar. Your decision to move was a mental event. How much control does this give you? Probably, quite a bit.

Another, interesting connection is the autonomic nervous system. This is the network that sets up several of the great physiological themes that dramatize our lives: the “fight or flight response” and its fun opposite, the “feed or breed” response. Here cholinergic neurons spritz epinephrine from nerve terminals sort of like lawn sprinklers to mediate the fight or flight response while acetylcholine is similarly spritzed to mediate the feed or breed response. This is quite different from the tight synaptic whispers that characterize how CNS neurons communicate with muscles and with each other. It is more like shouting into a crowd. How controllable are these processes at the conscious level? Research on meditative states suggests that at least for some people, with the appropriate training (years of it) these systems are highly controllable. There is the wonderful story of a final exam for certain Buddhist monks which involves them sitting naked on a glacier, wrapped in a wet sheet at sun set. By dawn the sheet must be dry. Somehow, they can consciously manipulate their mind/body connections to generate huge amounts of body heat. Control of blood sugar levels is less certain but in controlled medical studies there are intriguing hints of a response in superficially trained individuals.

Yet another mind/body connection is through the pituitary. This is a small gland at the base of the brain that receives input from a neuronal structure called the hypothalamus. Neurons in the hypothalamus release special hormones into the blood stream. These hormones go straight to the pituitary where they nudge certain cells and, in turn, these cells release other hormones that then course through the body. There are a great many hormones released by the pituitary which ultimately are under CNS control. One hormone in particular: ACTH (adrenocorticotropin) travels to the adrenal gland and promotes the release of a steroid hormone called cortisol. This is a major regulator of stress. As we discussed above, lose the stress and you get rid of a fair amount of blood glucose.

 So, when the grizzly bear of life comes charging at you, perhaps the best strategy is not to stress but rather to sit quietly and admire it. Or perhaps we should dance.