neuroscience

Company’s Promise To ‘Reconnect’ Brain Hemispheres Sparks Skepticism

SERIES: THE COMMERCE OF NEUROSCIENCE

Over the past decade, the popularity of neuroscience has spawned a number of brain-training cottage industries. In Part 1, we explored “Executive Function Coaching.” In Part 2, we look at a controversial company that claims to solve a wide range of childhood disorders by “synchronizing” the brain.

For many of its clients, Brain Balance is a treatment of last resort.

Take Elaine Ross, who lives in Nova Scotia. She says her 10-year-old grandson Tristan couldn’t make friends, didn’t fit in at school and was so disruptive at home that Ross and her husband offered to take him for a while.

“We just felt there was something missing,” she says.

His doctor put him on medication for Attention Deficit Disorder, but the family didn’t like the idea of drugs. Then one day Ross came across a book called “Disconnected Kids.”

“And to me, it was just Tristan,” Ross says. “All the things in that book were Tristan.”

The book was written by Robert Melillo, a chiropractor who’s built a reputation around what he calls “functional disconnection syndrome.” That’s a theory that the brain’s left and right hemispheres can get out of sync and cause a whole slew of disorders — from autism and bipolar disorder to dyslexia and Tourette’s.

In 2006, Melillo founded the Brain Balance Achievement Centers with the promise of harmonizing the brain’s hemispheres with his exercise and diet regimen. As a company video says: “If one hemisphere of the brain dominates the other, learning and behavior are effected. Brain Balance fixes this connection, resulting in life-changing improvement.”

That’s what Elaine Ross wanted. So this fall, she signed her grandson out of school and drove with him for 17 hours from Nova Scotia to a Brain Balance franchise in West Springfield, the closest one to her home. She checked into a nearby hotel on a busy commercial strip, and delivered Tristan several times a week to the center’s staff.

On one afternoon, Tristan is among a half dozen kids going in and out of rooms, doing unusual exercises. They have one sock on, one sock off, wear a vibrating device on one leg, and then hang on monkey bars, or spin in a chair, or jump-rope. With one eye covered by a patch, they do computer games, or step on a sensitized mat that sets off the sound of cowbells.

“We are using smell, sound, vision, and vibration to help stimulate the brain while they’re doing these activities,” says Megan Hudson, who started this Brain Balance franchise — one of 81 across the country — five years ago.

She says she was trained as a chiropractor, and took courses in early education, but never taught in a classroom. She says she assesses children’s brain functions according to the company’s guidelines.

“So say a kid is good with word reading, but their reading comprehension isn’t very good, they’re not really understanding what they’re reading. That’s going to look like a stronger left brain, a weaker right brain,” Hudson says. “If you stand on your left foot a lot longer, that’s going to indicate your left brain is weaker. And then we focus on stimulating that side.”

“They’re basically just making it up,” says Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale who founded the website Science-Based Medicine.

Like a number of Brain Balance critics, Novella says the company uses fancy scientific terms — pseudoscience, he calls it — to win over desperate parents.

“They’re nowhere near presenting good quality, rigorous science with a coherent scientific narrative about what’s going on and backing that up with solid evidence,” Novella says. “They’re going right to the public with marketing treatments, which I find unethical.”

Novella is far from the only skeptic of Brain Balance’s central concept. Many neuroscientists who study brain connectivity say the idea that the hemispheres have neatly divided functions is outdated. And they say it’s way oversimplistic to link almost all childhood disorders to a brain imbalance.

“It’s not just how is the right side working with the left side,” says Jennifer McDermott, a developmental psychologist at UMass Amherst. “There are different areas within the brain, different types of cells, and our understanding of that in development is quite difficult because the brain is such a complicated piece of machinery.”

The Brain Balance website does include a research page, with several papers co-written by founder Robert Melillo himself. There’s also an outdated Wikipedia entry and other brain-related articles that critics say have little relevance to Brain Balance’s methods.

Melillo says the company is in the process of gathering before-and-after data to prove the success stories he hears from parents, but many scientists say the only way to show one method works better than any other is through a randomized clinical trial. So far, Melillo concedes, none exist on the methods of Brain Balance.

“The idea that if you don’t have a randomized controlled study that compares to other things — that’s great if you have that, and somewhere down the line we will have all of that,” says Melillo, “but it doesn’t mean that what you’re saying isn’t valid.”

While Melillo insists he based his technique on thousands of neuroscience studies, he says Brain Balance operates officially as an afterschool program, not medical treatment, and no insurance company will pay for it.

But Brain Balance is a lot more expensive that most afterschool programs. At the West Springfield franchise, Megan Hudson says kids generally come for three hours a week, and it costs more than $2,000 a month, for four to six months. She says that may explain why business has been slower than expected — or it could be the New England market.

“There’s a lot of really smart people in this area, and I think that’s actually gotten in the way,” she says. “They’re very skeptical.”

Elaine Ross admits she wasn’t sure early on the program was helping her grandson. After he started, and she took him off all his medication, as Brain Balance insisted, his behavior got worse.

“He’s been quite a handful,” she says, “so I’ve talked to the girls here, and they’ve said that is normal, because the brain is shifting.”

I called Ross a month or so after Tristan finished the program — at first, she says he was more defiant than ever.

“But after a couple weeks, things settled down,” she says, “and we haven’t had any more of that type of behavior.”

So if clients are satisfied with the results, is there a problem?

“Absolutely, there’s massive harm to this,” says Steve Novella. “It sucks away limited resources — money, time, emotional investment, mental and physical energy.”

Even skeptics like Novella believe some kids do improve in behavior or academics after Brain Balance. But they say that’s probably because they’re getting exercise, or one-on-one attention, or they were just ready to move on to the next developmental level.

Still, there appear to be many parents willing to put up the money and hope for the best. Brain Balance says it plans to open 25 new franchises next year.

Study: Binge Drinking Alters Brain Development

by: Karen Brown

New research out of UMass-Amherst and Louisiana State University suggests that binge drinking during adolescence may reduce neural connections in the pre-frontal cortex — at least in rats. The study was released this week in the Journal of Neuroscience.

UMass neuroscientist Heather Richardson says previous studies of human teenagers found brain differences between those who drank heavily and those who didn’t. The drinkers tended to have fewer neural connections in the pre-frontal cortex, where a lot of decision-making and emotion regulation takes place.

But Richardson says it was hard to parse out whether those differences were caused by the alcohol use — or were already there before. So by giving sweetened alcohol to adolescent rats, researchers could see damage to the neural connections after heavy drinking. And because there are many similarities in rodent and human brain cells, she hopes the results will be cautionary.

“It’s important for young people to understand that they’re brains are still developing,” Richardson says. “Teenagers are certainly are going to go out and take risks and it’s important they can understand that may have a lasting effect on their brain.”

Richardson says she hopes neuroscientists will use these findings to come up with better treatments for alcohol addiction in teens.

Marathon Bombing Study Makes Link Between Brain and Trauma

by: Karen Brown

Updated: 4/18/14 5 p.m.

When the Boston Marathon bombing occurred, neuroscientists at Harvard University were midway through a study on trauma and the adolescent brain. As a result, they say they were able to make some new scientific links between PTSD and media exposure.

Last April, Professor Katie McLaughlin and her colleagues at Harvard were studying the brains of young people who’d been through serious adversity. They had recruited about 150 children and teens– half had reported early trauma or stress, and half had not. From previous psychological research, they knew that people who were abused or traumatized as kids have much higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.

“And we want to understand why that is the case,” McLaughlin says. “What is it about those experiences that leads these kids to be at such elevated risk for mental health problems?”

McLaughlin and her co-investigator, Margaret Sheridan, gave their subjects emotionally taxing activities to do while in an MRI scanner — disturbing pictures to look at, or frustrating tasks — and asked them to try to cope with negative emotions. When they measured what happened in the brain, the researchers saw that children with a history of trauma had heightened activity in the amygdala — a center of emotional processing in the brain.

“The idea we’re testing this study is that exposure to trauma can disrupt typical patterns of brain development, … either making these children have more extreme emotional reaction to changes in the environment or to stressors, or making it more difficult for them to modulate their emotional responses,” she says.

In most brain studies on stress and trauma, subjects are tested through artificial situations created in the lab. But in the middle of this study, a real-life trauma occurred: the marathon bombing.

“You know, everyone was in a bit of shock after the events happened,” McLaughlin says. “It was probably a few days later when we thought to ourselves, we have a unique opportunity here to examine predictors of how children respond to these kinds of unpredictable widescale traumatic events.”

If — as in many studies — all you have is a picture of the brain after a traumatic event, it’s hard to know whether the brain changed as a result of the event or whether the brain was already predisposed to react badly to trauma. But McLaughlin had a group of subjects whose brains had been scanned before the bombing. So she sent them an online survey about how much media coverage they’d watched, and how they reacted emotionally. From the 80-some responses, McLaughlin says they learned that the children who already suffered from depression or anxiety were much more likely to develop PTSD symptoms after the bombing.

“We also found that children and adolescents who had previously experienced violence, particularly violence in their community, such as witnessing someone get mugged, seeing someone get shot, were also more likely to develop PTSD following the attack,” she says.

McLaughlin says that confirms previous studies suggesting that early exposure to violence makes someone more, not less, sensitized to violence later on. But McLaughlin is particularly excited about learning why that occurs. She says the kids whose brains had heightened amygdala response in the early study — and those tended to be kids with trauma histories — also were more likely to report symptoms of PTSD after the bombing. That told the researchers they may have found a physical marker in the brain that can help predict individual reactions to trauma — from terrorism to accidents to something more minor.

“And the more that we can understand the neurobiological markers as well as the psychological and social markers that make some children and adolescents at greater risk, the better able we’ll be to deliver early and effective interventions to prevent the onset of mental health problems,” she says.

A final finding of the study, McLaughlin says, has to do with media exposure to violence. The more the young people had watched coverage of the bombing, and the manhunt, the more likely they were to feel unsafe or under threat, and to develop mental health problems afterwards. She says this was true even among kids who did NOT have an apparent biological predisposition to stress.

“High exposure to media coverage of a terrorist attack is enough to increase their risk for developing mental health problem,” she says.

And while acts of terrorism cannot be controlled by parents, she adds, exposure to the media can. McLaughlin is now a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her study on the marathon bombing is still under peer-review.