Cobbers on the Brain

 
Like many other students at Concordia College, I am (was) a student athlete. I wrestled for three years at Concordia, and I wrestled all the way from high school back to kindergarten. Only my senior year did I decide that enough was enough and it was time to hang up the wrestling shoes. And yet I feel guilty despite all the time and energy I spent cultivating my skills. My reasoning for quitting was that it was time to give my brain a break.
 
Nearly a year ago today I was wrestling with a teammate. It was the off season, so we were just messing around. My partner took a low shot, which I blocked with my knee. We had gone through this motion probably a thousand times before, but this time the knee cap to his temple knocked him out. He was fine, but he was unconscious for a few moments.
Instances like my wrestling practice are all too common in American colleges and high schools. Our obsession with sports is often chalked up to their ability to help young people develop character traits like tenacity and team working cohesiveness. But what’s the catch?
 
Our Concordia College neurochemistry class reviewed whats happening to our brain cells following a concussion, and there’s five things happening on a molecular level that you should know about.

1. Ionic Flux-  After that big hit, your brain cells are reeling, and the ions (sodium, potassium, and calcium) are flying all over the place. Lots of positive ions move out of the cells, and they can’t signal anymore. This doesn’t allow the brain to communicate effectively.
2. Energy crisis- Dealing with an injury takes a lot of energy. When the ions start moving around, your brain cells try to move them back against their gradient. This takes up a ton of energy, and the brain cells end up exhausting their energy stores rather quickly. In turn, your brain cells are subjected to metabolic stress, which is not a good thing.
3. Cytoskeletal damage- If your brain cells were a building, and you threw those buildings against a wall really really hard, you’d expect there to be some damage right? This also happens to your brain cells during a concussion. The mechanical support system that holds your cells together (called the cytoskeleton) can break apart from the force of the hit.
4. Axonal damage- Axons relay signals between brain cells, and they look like a long bridge projecting from the cells. Unfortunately these long bridges are also prone to breaking just like the cytoskeleton. Cells with broken axons tend to shrink and/or die.
5. Protease dysfunction- Proteases are the small molecules that recycle proteins. To do this however, the protease needs energy. Remember the energy crisis that’s going on in your brain? Well if we don’t have the energy to keep your cells alive, we probably won’t be breaking down any proteins. This results in the accumulation of proteins within cells. This isn’t a big deal in younger brains normally, but as we age this can cause problems.

Even with all this evidence that hitting each other with our heads is bad for us (duh) we continue to engage in sports that consistently cause concussions. After thinking about this, I think I would still wrestle even if I knew it I would get a concussion. I believe that it’s easy for people to glaze over the life lessons we can take away from sports, but I definitely would not be going to medical school without having wrestled first. Wrestling taught me to stay on task and keep grinding even when things aren’t going well. I likely would have given up on my dream of being a physician without sports, so the brain trauma was worth it for me. But I think it is important to educate younger people about the risks involved in contact sports, so they can decide for themselves.

Sometimes we like to make fun of liberal arts degrees.  I may not understand my tax forms, but at least I know about quantum tunnelling!  Those kinds of comments happen often.  Learning about seemingly random things you never thought you were signing up for is tedious at times, but when you step back and look at what four years has done, you start to appreciate it.
During senior year, students take a capstone course as the culmination of their liberal arts education.  The courses are designed to blend disparate fields of study and bring them together to deepen students’ knowledge about a topic.  Capstone courses also involve cultural awareness and involvement in the local community.  At Concordia, topics of capstone courses include world musics, dangerous literature, and the biochemistry of cancer.  I took neurochemistry for my capstone course.  Don’t worry, it was actually a lot more fun than I expected.  
What do capstone courses have that others don’t?  That became clear in our weekly group discussions.  We would break into small groups and discuss aspects of the disease/ issue/ chemical pathway of the week.  During our week on schizophrenia, a student brought up an idea from an Indian religions class.  A person with schizophrenia living in India might not be avoided as a dangerous anomaly.  Instead they might be treated with respectful distance or even valued as someone with a gift.  Maybe the way we shun people with mental illness in America contributes to poorer outcomes for patients.  In a normal neurochemistry class, no one would have ever raised that question.  
When our different skills came together, our overall understanding grew tremendously.  As we tried to understand a research article on addiction, students from different fields had different perspectives to give.  Neuroscience majors explained the mechanisms of reward and long-term changes in the dopamine neurons of the striatum.  Psychology majors told us about how the reward pathway works on a larger scale with classical conditioning and state dependent memory.  Pre-med students understood that many addictions begin with prescription narcotics, and that the opioid epidemic is driven by more than individual brains, but by systemic, bureaucratic problems.  With many people adding their own experiences to the pile, everyone developed a broader knowledge of the issue.  
The ultimate aim, of course, is coming closer to fixing intractable diseases– of brains and of society.  A sweeping, entrenched epidemic like we see with opioids can not be solved using only neuroscientists.  Medications need to be prescribed by vigilant doctors and accompanied by therapy from perceptive counselors.  We will need meticulous statisticians to help to manage the health of millions of people.  Only social workers are able to help the families of addicts, and sometimes to heal fully you need a musician or a comedian thrown in for good measure.  Before I took my capstone course I knew that teamwork would be necessary, but the course showed me how to make that teamwork happen, and how powerful a synthesis of minds can be.  

The neurochemistry capstone is unlike any science class I have taken at Concordia. While the background of chemistry, biology, and neuroscience is helpful, it was learning how everything relates that was so integral to the articles. With each article came a new discussion, direction, and potential solutions to the many problems. It was great to have students with different backgrounds in the class which really helped our discussions throughout the weeks. We were able to challenge each other with new ideas or thought provoking questions.

    Each week, everyone in our class was able to contribute new information or a new perspective on the “article/disease of the week”. It was challenging to look at diseases from a multidisciplinary lens. We also stressed the importance of sharing science with the general population. While innovative research, conferences, and scientific literature is important, it is also important to communicate that information to the general public in understandable terms. Often times in society, this aspect is overlooked. We learned ways to be concise and explain things in a way that was educational and accurate. Communication in different mediums was a skill we utilized a lot in this class, with presentations, written essays, partnered discussions (or speed dating as we liked to call it), and blog posts. The practice of sharing scientific findings with the general public was especially achieved through the blog posts. We also were able to practice our artistic skills and abstract thinking to reduce complicated ideas into simple drawings or ‘ARTstracts’. Some of us who aren’t as artistically gifted found this to be a difficult component to the blogs!

Because many of the diseases result in degeneration and death, it elicits the need for a cure to be found. Before treatments can be discovered it is important to understand the pathogenesis and pathways that are disrupted during this disease states. Many of them are very complicated and have lots of difficult components and potential causes. We started the class with a foundation on some of the basic pathways involved in cellular metabolism and maintenance and then applied this knowledge each week.

            Week after week we were able to tackle difficult diseases with complicated pathways. We would dissect them, question them, investigate them, and discuss them. Our Friday discussions were always interesting, and usually took tangents with deep thought questions and social implications as well as application to our own lives. Being able to discuss the science, and culture of diseases with a group of fellow college students is quite rewarding. Sometimes I think we forget that most people do not wish to discuss the adenylyl cyclase pathway for 70 minutes on a Wednesday. Yet we plugged along tackling one problem at a time – often leaving with more questions than answers. The more we learned, the less we feel we know! While this concept is frustrating, it also leads to inspiration and innovation that I hope we are able to bring to the world one day.

We also split into teams and worked on a community action project which was another way to bridge the gap between science and the general public. My group looked at eating disorders, especially on campus and with athletes. By holding a talk on campus for students, coaches, and teachers we were able to reach an audience that normally would not hear about the role of neurochemistry in eating disorders. It is important to raise awareness, and keep people educated and informed as to what is going on in our bodies.

            I felt like this class was a good way to cap off my time at Concordia. It was a good culmination of many of the courses I have taken here at Concordia. I know I personally was able to connect Vaccinology, Anatomy and Physiology, Psychology 111 & 206, Immunology, Microbiology, Religion and Science, Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Embryology with this class. On top of that my classmates had other classes and experiences to add to it! That just shows how important it is to have that encompassing experience that can connect many fields and ideas. The ‘liberal arts’ way of thinking is very important in approaching some of the issues we are going to face in the future. Having a wide basis of knowledge allows you to think more critically and connect dots between two seemingly unrelated fields.

As described in detail above this class has hit all the liberal arts goals: to instill a love for learning, develop foundational skills, develop an interdisciplinary understanding, examine culture, ethical, physical and spiritual self-understanding, and encourage responsible participation in the world.

You have probably seen the muscle tremors that affect Parkinson’s patients.  Parkinson’s is a disease that kills dopamine-producing neurons in the brain.  While traits like intelligence, personality, and memory can decline, the most damage happens to the motor neurons that move our muscles.  Over a period of decades, muscle control gradually declines in Parkinson’s patients.  There are only a few treatments available for Parkinson’s, and they can only slow the progression of the disease or deal with the symptoms.