Three ways to prevent or turn off nerve damage….

Today's Post:  Thursday, 5-8-2014

There are several situations where nerve damage or nerve pain happens.

Concussions cause this.

Surviving explosions but with some brain damage also have this.

Type 2 diabetics who discover their high blood sugar too late or who fail to do the things that bring it down often get a kind of nerve pain called peripheral neuropathy.

(If you or someone you know is in a contact sport like football where concussions are likely, it was just in the medical news today that getting a mouth guard custom fitted to you by a dentist cuts your number of concussion by more than half.  The article was on a study done with kids in sports.  But the strategy likely works in athletes over 16 also.)

1.   ".... diabetic neuropathy is more common than multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) combined. More than half of all diabetics have some form of nerve pain and currently there is no treatment to stop the damage or reverse it."

It turns out this negative statement that this pain cannot be stopped or reversed is NOT accurate.

In addition to turning off the high blood sugars 100% of the time to remove the cause,

it has been found that taking the supplement r-lipoic acid 300 mg once or twice a day does reduce nerve pain.  It and alpha lipoic acid, which is half r-lipoic acid, cause glutathione release which is an extremely potent antioxidant and have a slight anti-aging effect by lengthening telomeres.

(Taking NAC, n-acetyl-cysteine also may help as it also does both these things.  500 mg once or twice a day is used.)

2.  We’ve already known that taking the omega 3 supplement DHA &/or getting an equivalent amount of it from eating wild caught fish high in it particularly when added to regular exercise causes the release of the nerve and brain cell growth hormone, BDNF.

So that is likely to be helpful also.

Now, new research shows getting abundant DHA before an event like a concussion likely to cause nerve damage can prevent all or much of the damage!

In the Newsmax health email I got on 4-9-2014 they reported a study that found,

Results showed that the cell cultures that were also exposed to omega-3 docosahexanenoic acid (DHA) showed approximately 90% less neuroinflammation and 90% less neuronal brain cell death compared with the cells that were not exposed to the fish oil compound.

So it also looks to me that adding it after the injury will also be restorative between the two sets of information.

3.  Some nerve damage is caused by glycation due to high blood sugar or eating food cooked too long &/or at too high a temperature.  Benfotiamine is a supplement that was developed in Japan to help people with nerve damage from excessive alcohol intake.

Some reports show it can help or reverse nerve damage in 50 mg a day doses particularly in people where the damage was caused by glycation in type 2 diabetics.

Thought I saw new research about a month ago verifying this effect but found it wasn’t where I thought I’d saved it.

Didn't find it just now.  And the evidence before that was mixed.  However if you have nerve pain or nerve damage, it may be worth adding to the first two methods to see if in your case it also helps.

The first two things are very exciting to me.  They do seem to work AND they have abundant other health benefits.