Richard Bergland Quotes

If a 'memory peptide' could be found to be deficient in patients with dementia, these patients could be treated in the same way that patients with diabetes are treated with insulin.

Twenty years from now, the disease, 'presenile dementia' will be understood as well as diabetes is today.

Neurosurgeons perform ventricular taps with great frequency. …While this is not something to be done lightly, the risks are no greater than those for cardiac catheterization.

The brain is a gland of unity: the brain is one with the body.

Miracles of inner healing are everyday occurrences.

The ventricles of the human brain... are filled with hormones, and until the hormones swimming in these oceans are dredged out, countless millions of our fellows will remain with brain illnesses that can be neither understood nor treated. Many of their hormone-hungry brains may be fixed as easily as hormone-hungry bodies are fixed with thyroid hormone, insulin, oestrogen and testosterone, but that work cannot begin until cause and effect relationships between brain hormones and brain diseases have been established.

In decades to come ventricular catheterization performed to measure hormone concentrations will become as routine as the measurement of lumbar 'pressure' is today.

The greatest array of brain hormones is found in the ventricle, not in the spinal fluid.

The measurement of hormones in the bloodstream of patients will not reflect the endocrine activity of the brain.

The brain remains silently separated from the noisy endocrine consequences.

Some kinds of hormones, the 'steroids', pass readily into the brain, but the 'peptide' hormones produced by the pituitary, the gut, and any other glands do not easily pass through the walls of brain capillaries.

As hormonal amplification is the hallmark of all of the brain-to-gland relationships of neuroendocrinology, hormonal deamplification is the hallmark of all gland-to-brain relationships of endocrine neurology. This is the fundamental difference between the two sciences.

The brain has all the characteristics of a gland except one—leaky capillaries—the sturdy brain capillaries are collectively called the 'blood-brain-barrier'. This barrier can easily be demonstrated by injecting a blue dye into an animal; every other organ (except the testicle) turns blue, but the blood-brain barrier keeps the brain as white as snow.

It would be easier... if all animals spoke the same endocrine language, for then correlations made in the laboratory could be quickly moved to the bedside. Unfortunately, such is not the case. The hormone prolactin, for example, has at least seventy-eight different functions in seventy-eight different species

In the past decade, as regulating hormones have been found throughout the body, the soul has lost its home. It is scattered everywhere—in the brain, the gut, the ovary, the pituitary and the adrenal; if paracrinologists are correct, every cell contains the well-chiselled molecules that give life to the soul and guidance to the mind.