A Brain Injury Can Affect More Than Your Brain - How Traumatic Brain Injury Impacts Your Heart, Gut, Hormones, and Immune System with Dr. Aaron Hartman | Brain Injury | E166

When you get a traumatic brain injury, one of the things that happens is you lose your heart rate variability. Now, many of you biohackers and people out there in the creative world and even athletes know that your heart rate variability is probably the best predictor of your heart function. But after a brain injury, what happens is you lose heart rate variability. Your brain is the master regulator of your entire body. It's like the CEO of your business. Business being your body. And when it gets interrupted, injured, hurt, infects the entire, your entire body, the accounting department, which is your metabolism, doesn't look at the checks and bills quite well. Your HR department, which is your hormones that talks within the body, doesn't function quite well. Your immune system, which is the security system of your business, becomes dysfunctional, sometimes even attacking itself. And then the operations, your gut, your heart, your lungs, all that goes into array, it just gets kind of really messed up. We're going to talk about that, like how can one thing cause so many issues in your body? So, we want to talk about the one brain, one body concept here and how when your brain gets dysregulated from an injury. And again, this can be a traumatic thing, it can be an emotional thing, it can be a PTSD-like thing. All these can look similar to a concussion-like syndrome. And so, having that concept kind of tucked away as you're thinking about your health and for myself when I think about my patient's health, is super critical. So, we want to talk about that during this episode just for you to have a better understanding of how when I, as an integrative functional medicine doctor, look at someone to really realize maybe your gut issues, your palpitations, your sleep issues actually correlating with a brain disorder. It was really interesting when I did training in functional neurology for about a year. Focus of that entire training was looking at how your brain impacts your entire body. I mean, it was really I use these concepts with my daughter, Anna, to help with her. And many of you who've been following us know that, you know, part of my— what got me in this kind of medicine was actually taking care of my daughter and her brain injury she had before she was born. So, we're going to go through this just to help you have a little better idea how I and individuals like myself think about this. Hope this information's helpful. We were responding to people asking questions. A little bit of housekeeping. If you could subscribe, that'd be super helpful. Less than half of the people listening to this podcast right now even follow us. So just follow us, clicking the button below. Making a comment, that helps get this type of information out there. It also helps us to know that what we're saying is being helpful. And then put some comments. You know, one of the reasons we're doing this series is actually because we were asked to do it by our listeners. So, if there's something you'd like us to talk about, please put that in the comments. That's kind of our goal is to actually help our listeners. So anyway, let's get back into this. So, let's first talk about the brain-heart connection. This is something that just recently kind of has come into the functional medicine world understanding how your brain interacts with your heart. It's really interesting when you get a traumatic brain injury, one of the things that happens is you lose your heart rate variability. Now, many of you biohackers and people out there in the creative world and even athletes know that your heart rate variability is probably the best predictor of your heart function. But after a brain injury, what happens is you lose heart rate variability. It's also a marker for vagal nerve function. So, many of you know the vagal nerve comes down, it's the longer, it attaches to all, basically all of your internal organs, your heart, kidney, spleen, which is interesting because your spleen is the largest lymph node in your body, right? And your entire GI tract. So, all of a sudden, there's actually an anatomical connection between your brain, your heart, and your gut. And so, what happens with a traumatic brain injury or even PTSD or all the different ways your brain can get injured, you see that impacting heart rate variability, heart rate function, palpitations. And it's really interesting, the ancients would talk about the heart, the splenkhnia, their gut. Feeling they thought actually the brain was actually in their gut, not there. They felt the stuff in the brain was just mush because the way your body responds to these kind of things, you actually kind of feel it either in your heart or in your gut. This has actual anatomical connections associated with it. So, it's a big deal. And sometimes actually exercising if your brain-heart connection is off can actually accelerate or make a brain injury worse. Hence, acutely, "Oh, I just had a brain injury, concussion, whatever." rest is the main thing, not exerting yourself too much, but that can play into some people's fatiguing issues. You know, I push myself in a crash and it takes me 3 days to get better. We'll see that in people with chronic fatigue and fibro, as well as individuals with a concussion.

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There's also this brain-gut connection, which, you know, I think most of us are familiar with right now. 75% of your neurotransmitters, you know, things in your brain are actually made in your gut. 90% of serotonin, which is your happy neurotransmitter, is made in your gut. 50% of dopamine, which is your focus neurotransmitter, is made in your gut. And with a brain injury, that can actually become disrupted. When you get, we talked about previously, when you get a brain injury, you get leaky brain, but you also get leaky gut. And part of that can do is actually release toxins called endotoxins, lipopolysaccharide, which are brain inflammatory. So it becomes this feed-forward cycle where if your gut was already off a little bit, you get a brain injury, now you're releasing more toxins. It can make your brain off even more. The other thing about it is that butyrate, which is a short-chain fatty acid made in your gut that actually protects your brain, which is neuroprotective. All of a sudden, you can actually get a disruption of your bacteria, your microbiome, and your gut from the brain injury, like make less butyrate. And now you're having less neuro brain protection from your gut to your brain that was initiated by a brain injury. So it's really kind of— all this is quite interesting. And you can actually drive motility issues, whether it's constipation, diarrhea, digestion issues. It's really interesting just looking at your meal. About 25% of all your digestive enzymes are just released to digest a meal, just looking at it and thinking, "Oh, that's a nice meal. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to pray before I eat." Right? Well, having a brain injury all of a sudden affects that aspect of your digestion cycle. It can result in you not actually digesting your food, having undigested food in your stool. So, all of a sudden, looking at a gut, doing a gut test can actually give us a window into part of that gut-brain connection, which is really super important. You know, sleep, we all, we've discussed this before. This is Something that's commonly overlooked is the sleep disturbances. So I'm not going to, you know, say too much about this because I've already discussed it. But if you're having problems with sleep initiation, sleep maintenance, and then sleep quality, which is how do you feel when you wake up, this could potentially be part of this gut-brain axis thing affecting your sleep. We've already talked about the emotional psychiatric issues and how that, you know, having emotional issues, again, dopamine, serotonin, these, you know, these are all things we kind of know about. Thinking in the lines of how is this related to your gut-based pathology affecting your gut, affecting your, your entire body. Other things that this can look like as well is you can develop certain autoimmune conditions. 'Cause once you have a breakdown in your brain barrier and your gut barrier, well, where is 90% of the immune system? It's in your GI tract. So people might have more gluten sensitivities. One of the things we do in our clinic often is doing antibody testing, looking for ANA, ANCA, thyroid antibodies, celiac antibodies. All of a sudden now, if you develop these markers, it can be a window into, is there a disruption in this gut-brain axis induced by some kind of brain injury? I haven't really focused on this that much in my introductory comments on episode 1, but this is not just physical injury. It can be an emotional injury. It can be a PTSD event, you know, major adverse childhood event, you know, seeing someone Abusing a family member, being abused, seeing your— another parent, all these things, major adverse childhood events can actually act like a physical brain injury coming from emotional side. But the other thing to think about is your brain immune system connection. I mentioned the vagal nerve going to your spleen, which is the largest lymph node in your body, but it goes throughout your entire GI tract. So all of a sudden the brain injury can affect your immune system. And make you more prone to allergies, eczema, asthma. You can get a breakdown of your gut barrier. I've had, had patients actually develop skin issues, dry skin, eczema, rosacea related to the brain injuries. And this is measurable. You can measure it with, you know, glial fibrillary peptide markers. You can measure it with microglia activation. There are testing actually. Now, I had one of my patients who, she actually interesting enough had a thing called Aerotoxic Syndrome, which is not talked about a lot here in the United States, but it's a thing over in Europe, particularly the UK. And it was— she basically had a smoke event. She was an Arab stewardess. And actually, there's an issue with the ventilation in the jet. She had a smoke event. And it was interesting, she had a brain MRI that looked like a traumatic brain injury that was related to the smoke event. And she had a lot of TDI-like symptoms from that event. So, your immune system and autoimmunity and all your reactivity, reacting at yourself, can be precipitated by a brain related injury.

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I already talked about all the hormonal stuff. Now, you know, it's interesting, hormones are brain protective. And when they're low, you are more brain susceptible to things. So, as you get older in adulthood, your testosterone's off, you're female, your estrogen's a little low, that can set you up to be more susceptible for a brain injury. And the symptoms, severity of them can be worse if your hormones are off. It's really interesting. Progesterone specifically is brain protective in traumatic brain injuries. And some interesting protocols using, you 20 milligrams in men and 100 milligrams in women to 200 nightly to help with brain inflammation. Well, how many of my, you know, patients on menopause have actual sleep problems, anxiety issues, and you give them progesterone, it helps. So all of a sudden, having your hormones balanced can be an important part of your brain health, but also they can become imbalanced by that brain injury. We did mention before the whole thing with sugar. If your glucose is high, your insulin is high, that makes your brain more susceptible to injury. It also affects your metabolism of glucose, which we talked about previously, can be caused one by traumatic brain injury. But if you already have it, it depends on what you read. Maybe 60% of Americans are insulin resistant. 15% of Americans all have blatant diabetes and 30% are pre-diabetic. All of a sudden being an American with these metabolic issues, energy production issues can make you more susceptible to a traumatic brain injury. But also if you have, there's a brain injury, you can actually make these things pop up. So there's a whole lot of different metabolic issues. And then the idea of the lipid membranes themselves, we use a thing called lipid medicine a lot with a lot of our Zucker patients. And it's just appreciating and realizing that your membranes, which connect, you know, the walls around all your cells, if they're already dysregulated and you have a traumatic event, it's a feed-forward cycle. And so using lipid medicine, using phosphatidylcholine, phospholipids, balanced omega-3 and 6s, it's really interesting how things like butyrate as well. Which we use in our patients with autoimmune issues. And even some of the peptides that we're using like BPC-157, thymosin beta-4, and even thymosin alpha-1, these can actually be neural regulating, help repair a leaky brain and a leaky gut. And then throwing things like KPV in there can help with some of the gut microbiome imbalances. But the point is, is that all of a sudden now this idea, this connection, everything's connected. It's a lot of stuff. And so, we're going to kind of come to a close with explaining like and how things work. And we'll talk next about, so what? What's the big deal? You know, what's next?

How do you treat this?

That's the big question. Great. We talked about the science. We talked about what you've experienced, but what can you actually do on Monday, this Monday after whenever this comes out on Friday, or even later on to actually start your biothealing repair? That's what I want to talk about next. So I'm excited to start talking about answers to this issue. You came here for straight answers on your health.

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