Hello. This is Tenmei Watanabe from Seito Medical School. This time it's a medical school report. We would like to publish the results of medical research to date.
The autonomic nervous system includes the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. By using the dichotomy between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, we can understand the causes of many diseases.
Sympathetic nerves are high blood pressure, high body temperature, vasoconstriction, and high heart rate. If the sympathetic nervous system is dominant, there is a positive correlation with, for example, metabolic syndrome (visceral fat obesity that leads to lipid abnormalities, hyperglycemia, and hypertension). Metabolic syndrome is the cause of all kinds of diseases, and the sympathetic nervous system is dominant.
Furthermore, if the sympathetic nervous system is dominant, excess oxygen and metabolism will be promoted.
Several questions arise here. Since I'm interested in brain diseases, let's take a look at the relationship between the autonomic nervous system, which at first glance seems unrelated to the disease called cerebral infarction.
Cerebral infarction is a disease caused by blockage of blood vessels in the brain, but there is also "cerebral thrombosis," where arteriosclerosis progresses and blood vessels become clogged, and "cerebral thrombosis," which occurs when blood clots formed in the heart are carried to the brain and block blood vessels. There is a cerebral embolism.
I had the question of whether blood clots form due to low blood pressure or high blood pressure. Whether blood clots occur due to low blood pressure or high blood pressure, if the presence or absence of blood pressure is a factor in cerebral infarction, we can find a relationship between brain disease and the autonomic nervous system.
In conclusion, after a blood clot forms, blood pressure rises to allow blood to pass through the blood vessel blocked by the clot, resulting in high blood pressure. However, I don't know if I had high blood pressure or low blood pressure before the blood clot formed.
In order to confirm the strength of blood pressure when blood clots form, we will look into common factors such as complications. This reveals the fact that thrombosis is often a complication of obesity. In other words, it can be inferred that obesity is caused by sympathetic nerve-dominated hypertension, as seen in the metabolic syndrome, and that hypertension was the same before and after the formation of blood clots.
In establishing a new medical science called autonomic neurology, I would like to take this approach of finding commonalities from the symptoms and causes of complications. Furthermore, we treat the autonomic nervous system as a dichotomy of sympathetic nerves and parasympathetic nerves, and investigate which disease each disease belongs to.For example, in the case of hypertension, one treatment method is to lower the blood pressure, that is, the cause of hypotension. This means that we can expect it to be as follows.
So far we have talked about the sympathetic nervous system being dominant, but I would like to talk about the parasympathetic nervous system being dominant.
If parasympathetic nerves are dominant, there will be low blood pressure, low body temperature, vasodilation, and low heart rate. Parasympathetic nerves activate gastrointestinal activity.
Parkinson's disease is one of the diseases associated with parasympathetic nervous system dominance. Parkinson's disease presents with movement disorders such as tremors in the hands and difficulty moving or walking. Although it is considered to be a progressive neurodegenerative disease, onset is most common in middle-aged people over 40 years of age, especially in people over 65 years of age.
I felt that my hands were shaking and my movements and walking were slow, similar to how people react in winter. If Parkinson's disease causes symptoms such as hand tremors due to the same factors as people who live in winter, I feel that it would be interesting to investigate how the autonomic nervous system is related to people who live in winter. did. In other words, the assumption is that people with Parkinson's disease have the same reactions as people in winter.
In Japan, it is said to be caused by damage to dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra. Conditions other than Parkinson's disease that have similar symptoms are called Parkinson's syndrome. Many patients with Parkinson's disease also have dementia.
One of the key points is that Parkinson's disease gives the illusion of the cold winter weather, which may be due to a lack of amino acids, which results in no metabolism and a low body temperature. Metabolism is low and body temperature is low when parasympathetic nerves are dominant. Furthermore, if the parasympathetic nervous system is dominant, it can be inferred that there will be more or less low blood pressure and low heart rate.
Since many patients with Parkinson's disease have dementia as a secondary disease, it can be inferred that dementia is also a disease on the same side as the parasympathetic nervous system.
Furthermore, it is believed that dopamine is insufficient due to damage to dopamine neurons, and conversely, manic states such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorders, in which there is an excess of dopamine, are dominated by the sympathetic nervous system, which is the opposite of the parasympathetic nervous system. I understand.
Metabolic syndrome, in which the sympathetic nervous system is activated due to its relationship with obesity, occurs in many patients with schizophrenia, and patients with Parkinson's disease are often thin, so the parasympathetic nervous system is associated with thinness. I can see that there are.
In relation to dementia, which is a secondary disease of Parkinson's disease, parasympathetic-dominated symptoms such as excessive sweating, night sweats, and dilated blood vessels in the skin can be seen in dementia with Lewy bodies. An increase in body temperature is accompanied by a decrease in body temperature, indicating that the parasympathetic nervous system is still dominant.
In winter, there is low blood pressure, hypothermia, poor metabolism, poor blood flow, and vasodilation.If you want to treat Parkinson's disease, first take measures to change Parkinson's disease, which is dominated by the parasympathetic nervous system, to dominated by the sympathetic nervous system. It is thought that improvement can be expected by taking these steps.