A Dude's Guide. . . to everything

Angelina Jolie, And Not A Joke In Sight

Angelina Jolie is a very brave woman.

I gotta tell you, dudes, I always thought of her — on those vanishingly few occasions when I actually did think of her — as a Hollywood flake, who thought the world hung on a chain around her neck. Right next to the vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood.

Now, though. . . I’ve got a whole new outlook on her.

As she revealed in a heart-felt, but tonally factual piece in Tuesday’s New York Times, Jolie’s mother fought cancer for more than a decade before finally falling to the disease at age 56. Far, far too early. Jolie’s mother died of breast cancer. She passed on to her daughter a love of life, and a much higher than normal chance that Jolie would get breast cancer as well.

Both Jolie and her mother carry a malformed gene — BRCA 1 — which gives those carrying it a 65 percent greater than normal chance of contracting breast cancer. And that’s before you factor in the fact that Jolie’s mother died from breast cancer.

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy.

Yeah, you read that right. Angelina Jolie, a woman who made a lot of her fame on the swell of her breasts and the plump of her lips. . . This same woman, who gets her every style choice dissected in the media. . . She had both of her breasts surgically removed.

And that’s the thing, dudes. Many women are defined by, and define themselves by, their looks. You know it. I know it. They know it. Actors more than most.

Jolie, though, took a hard look at her future and saw a world where her kids had to grow up without a mother, who might have avoided cancer had she only been a little less vain. This was a world she wanted no part of and I salute her for taking such a brave, forthright step.

In the op/ed piece in the New York Times, Jolie said she kept her operations secret to ensure there were no distractions. However, now that the breast tissue has been removed and the plastic surgery for reconstruction has been finished, she’s decided to discuss her decisions in public to show what can be done. To show that women with BRCA 1 don’t have to wait patiently for the gene to switch on and kill them.

I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.

She made the hard choice, but she did it with conviction. And she did it because she didn’t want to deprive her children as she had done without. That, dudes, is a parent of which we can be proud.

Share on Facebook Tags: A Dude's Guide to Health, A Dude's Guide to Kids, Actors, Angelina Jolie, Billy Bob Thornton, Brave Woman, Breast Cancer, Breasts, cancer, children, daughter, Decade, disease, Distractions, Doctors, Double Mastectomy, dude, Fame, Flake, future, Hollywood, Joke, Lips, Mastectomy, men, mother, New Outlook, New York Times, Occasions, opinion, Ovarian Cancer, parent, Plastic Surgery, Proactive, public, Reconstruction, Style Choice, Swell, therapy

Decoding A Long-Sent Signal

People with autism spectrum disorders like Asperger’s Syndrome have become much more visible in a number of different media lately. For example, take Dr. Sheldon Cooper, the ASD brilliant, socially awkward star of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Sheldon has an amazing mind for physics, but has more tics than a Swiss watch and all the charming, socially endearing mannerisms of a punch-drunk porcupine. That, to most people, is the face of Asperger’s or the spectrum.

And, although possibly much exaggerated for comedic effect, it’s also the face of the type of parent who might also give birth to a child with ASD.

“Parents of kids with autism don’t have autism or a genetic mutation, but they do have a similar personality type. It’s actually been labeled as the geek type,” said Dr. Robert Melillo, founder of the  Brain Balance Achievement Centers, an internationally recognized expert on Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and author of the recent book,  Autism: The Scientific Truth About Preventing, Diagnosing, and Treating Autism Spectrum Disorders–and What Parents Can Do Now. “Computer types; math, science folks; very intellectual. Those people are more likely to have a child with autism.”

Not really sure I’d count as a mathy person, especially considering that last week I told a class of fifth graders that I hated math and that if anyone said they actually liked it they were filthy, filthy liars. Still, I have definitely been labeled as a geek more than once. But more prone to having a child with ASD?

“That’s been pretty well documented,” Melillo said. “Wired Magazine had on the cover story on it where they called Autism and Asperger’s the Geek Syndrome. One in 15 in Silicon Valley kids have Asperger’s syndrome. Where there are pockets of a high density of children with autism, you usually find pockets of parents working in the high-tech industries.

“In addition, as you go up the socioeconomic scale, we find the more intelligent the parent is, the more money they make, the more likely they are to have autism. And that’s not related to the degree of medical care they can receive.”

That last bit rather neatly cut the legs off my next argument. I realize Dr. Melillo said that the meteoric rise in the number of ASD cases couldn’t be attributed only to diagnostic awareness, but I thought for sure the whole link to high-tech enclaves had to be something to do with how much medical care they can access.

“This sort of information, it cuts to the core of what autism is,” Melillo said. “What autism is, is a functional disconnection. There’s an imbalance in the development of the brain. There’s sections of the brain, particularly in the right side, that don’t keep up with growth in the rest of the brain. These are kids gifted in left-brain skills because of their parents.”

Right-brain skills, he said, are more social skills such as verbal interaction with others. That’s the area, Melillo said, where people on the spectrum really struggle.

“If we can’t coordinate both sides of the brain to work together, and one side of the brain is underdeveloped, we’re looking at autism,” he said. 

After my long conversation with Dr. Melillo, I emerged feeling as if I’d been exposed to an entirely new paradigm. While I’m not convinced the key to ASD lies completely in the environmental side of things, Dr. Melillo did bring up some intriguing ideas. I remain unconvinced about part of his argument because of his reliance on left brain/right brain theory which, according to a recent Psychology Today article, is unfounded. Still, Dr. Melillo did offer a nice counter to that idea.

Regardless, he’s certainly given me a lot to think about.

If you’d like to know more about autism and autism spectrum disorders, then please go hit up the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They’ve got a tremendous repository of information about ASD. There’s great statistics, some key information about treatment and diagnosis. . . Basically, if you have a question about ASDs, that’s where you’ll find the answer.

Wow, I was really tempted not to write this paragraph, mostly because the last one ended with a total word count for this post of 666 and I could never resist a good joke. Which, I can only guess, we’ll be seeing more of tomorrow as we’re back to the routine of me slamming pies into my own face. See you dudes then.

Share on Facebook Tags: A Dude's Guide to Health, A Dude's Guide to Kids, ADD, Asd, Asperger S Syndrome, Autism Asperger, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Big Bang Theory, Brain Skills, Cbs Sitcom, Centers For Disease Control And Prevention, Child Autism, Children With Autism, Computer Types, Development Of The Brain, Disconnection, dude, Fifth Graders, Geek, Genetic Mutation, High Density, left brain, liars, Mannerisms, Math Science, money, parents, Personality Type, Physics, Pockets, Porcupine, Psychology, right brain, Robert Melillo, science, Sides Of The Brain, Silicon Valley, Social Skill, Statistics, Swiss Watch

The Stars Like Grains Of Sand

There’s a very good chance, if the doctor to whom I’ve been talking for the last little while, that autism and autism spectrum disorders like learning disabilities and Asperger’s Syndrome aren’t caused only by genetic factors.

Dr. Robert Melillo, founder of the  Brain Balance Achievement Centers, an internationally recognized expert on Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and author of the recent book,  Autism: The Scientific Truth About Preventing, Diagnosing, and Treating Autism Spectrum Disorders–and What Parents Can Do Now, stressed that people with an ASD must have a genetic predisposition. That is, the genes that can cause ASDs are there in the person’s body, but it’s a whole host of environmental factors that actually triggers the disease process.

One very important environmental trigger, he said, is stress in parents. Not just job-stress, but a more pervasive stressed caused by constant activation of the body’s sympathetic nervous system, or the flight or fight response. This stress, he said, not only causes inflammation in the parents’ bodies, which certainly isn’t good, but it also can change how their genes work without changing the actual genetic code.

“When our bran and body are active and we’re healthy, our brain inhibits our fight or flight system in our body, what’s called the sympathetic nervous system,” he said. “If our body is working correctly, the stress levels go down. It lets us sleep better and eat better and we keep our stress response very low.”

The problem with that stress response, Melillo said, is that it can produce hormones which interacts with already extant genes, which then can cause a diminished cognitive response.

“If the adult has increased stress hormones, which can mask the effect of the gene for brain activiey, it doesn’t affect you much since the adult brain is already mostly already formed,” he said. “But if you pass that along in a turned-off position to your child, it will have a major impact.”

That, Melillo said, is from where the increase in ASD diagnoses is coming, a stressed-out population constantly teetering on the verge of flight or fight.

Sounds pretty horrible, actually. Still, all that bit is really some pretty good news. Which is that, if one of the major causes of ASD manifestation is parental stress and other environmental factors making an impact on the parents, there is every possibility that ASDs can be, if not cured, then severely ameliorated, Melillo said.

“One of the reasons I wrote the book is that most people are completely unaware that you can prevent it,” he said, speaking about his first book on the subject, Disconnected Kids: The Groundbreaking Brain Balance Program for Children with Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Neurological Disorders.

So there are things parents can do to reduce the risk of having an ASD child, as well as, according to Dr. Melillo, reduce the impact of an ASD on a child already on the spectrum. Still, I wondered, are there certain types of people who might be more inclined than others to having a child on the spectrum?

As it turns out, yes, there are. And I’ll be back on Tuesday with out last post on Dr. Melillo and autism to tell you dudes about it.

 

Share on Facebook Tags: A Dude's Guide to Health, A Dude's Guide to Kids, actor, Adhd, Adult Brain, Asd, Asperger S Syndrome, Asperger Syndrome, Autism Spectrum Disorders, Bran, children, Cognitive Response, disease, doctor, Dr Robert, dude, Environmental Factor, Environmental Factors, Flight System, Genetic Code, Genetic Factors, Genetic Predisposition, Good Chance, Grains Of Sand, Guide, Hormones, Inflammation, Learning Disabilities, Nervous System, Population, Robert Melillo, sleep, Stress Hormones, Stress Levels, Stress Response, Sympathetic Nervous System