The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7369 p422
1 October 2005

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The many uses of the nuts of Jupiter more
How to get a good night’s sleep more
Guarding the warder of the brain more

The many uses of the nuts of Jupiter

There is an interesting commentary in New Scientist for 13 August concerning the walnut tree (Juglans regia) and its fruit, sometimes known as Jupiter’s nuts, nux persica or nux regia.

The tree reaches a height of some 20m and has a massive trunk. The flowers, both male and female, appear in early spring before the leaves.

The tree is known to produce a naphthoquinone derivative, juglone, which is an insect repellant and is also toxic to some other plant species. However, its edible fruit provides health benefits for humans, being rich in vitamins, antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids. Recent reports have indicated that eating walnuts daily may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and benefit people with type 2 diabetes.
Pliny states that walnut was introduced into Italy from Persia. It probably reached Britain early in the 16th century and was common by the time John Gerard published his ‘Herball’ of 1597.

The tree’s bark and leaves are laxative, astringent and detergent. They have been employed to treat skin complaints, an infusion being both applied locally and consumed internally. A strong infusion of the bark has been used as a purgative. The unripe fruit has been used in pickles and is antiscorbutic.

Walnut wood used to be prized for making furniture and carved into the wheels and bodies of coaches. The oil of the fruit has been employed as a polish. The husks of the fruit provide a useful yellow dye and the leaves a brown dye, which was used by gypsies to stain the skin and protect against excessive sunshine. Crushed walnut shells are exceptionally hard and have been used in industrial abrasives. It is said that the ancient Egyptians embalmed mummies with the oil expressed from walnut kernels.

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How to get a good night’s sleep

Sleeping is sometimes a more complex affair than we imagine. A discussion by Michael H. Silber, a neurologist of the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in the US, explains some of the problems of chronic insomnia in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine for 25 August. He defines insomnia as “difficulty with the initiation, maintenance, duration or quality of sleep that results in the impairment of daytime functioning, despite adequate opportunity and circumstances for sleep”. An arbitrary delay of more than 30 minutes of sleep onset or less than 85 per cent of time asleep to time spent in bed is often assumed, but in fact subjective judgement of sleep quality and quantity is more important from the clinical angle.

Chronic insomnia lasting more than one month has an incidence of 10 to 15 per cent, It more frequently affects women, older adults and patients suffering from chronic medical and psychiatric disorders. It may result in fatigue, mood disturbances, problems with interpersonal relationships, occupational difficulties and a reduced quality of life.

Insomnia may be classified as primary or secondary. The first has an uncertain pathology, but is probably a state of hyper-arousal, with a higher metabolic rate and high secretion of adrenocorticotrophic hormone and cortisol. The second involves adjustment, possibly to the effect of a drug or food substance.

Treatment may involve cognitive behavioural therapy to counteract habits that induce insomnia. In primary insomnia such therapy is efficacious, when administered by a psychologist over six sessions, each roughly one hour. Trained primary care doctors or nurses can successfully administer the treatment over up to 10 sessions. Pharmacological treatment involves benzodiazepines, benzodiazepine-receptor agonists and sedating antidepressants. There are some doubts over the efficacy of diphenhydramine or doxylamine and melatonin.

Withdrawal effects, particularly rebound insomnia, are rare after treatment with long-duration benzodiazepines, and usually rare after the use of intermediate-acting benzodiazepines. Tricyclic antidepressants tend to induce unwanted side effects, such as dry mouth, postural hypotension, drowsiness, cardiac arrhythmias and weight gain. Combined cognitive behaviour and drug therapy is effective, the first having more prolonged benefit.

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Guarding the warder of the brain

Memory is a strange faculty. Lady Macbeth referred to it as, “the warder of the brain”. Physiologists and psychologists divide it into three broad categories — sensory memory, working memory and long-term memory.

Sensory memory concerns itself with the stimuli provided by vision, audition, odour and taste. Working memory decides the application of these stimuli, sometimes relying on one or more of many stages of recall, and extends itself to include long-term memory when called upon to do so.

This is not always a desirable asset to thought, and sometimes we would give much to rid our minds of it. “Cant thou not minister to a mind diseased / pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?” asks Macbeth of the doctor. In general, however, we place more value on the persistence of memory than on the ability to discard it at will.
Many schemes have been devised to help individuals recover memories that have temporarily slipped from their ken. These memory aids are called mnemonics — a term that derives from Mnemosyne, the Greek name of the goddess of memory and mother of the nine Muses. There are mnemonics that enable us to recall a sequence of letters or numbers. More simply, we can run in our minds the sequence of the alphabet until the idea we are trying to recall snaps into consciousness. This can be a highly effective method of recovering the name of an acquaintance that has momentarily slipped from memory but which we need to recall on the spur of the moment to avoid embarrassment. The same device serves also to recall the name of a geographical feature that we have lost when we want to mention it, despite knowing it well.

Another popular aide-memoire is a line of jargon, commonly in the form of a simple rhyme that makes nonsense as it stands but still tickles the memory trail. Such memory aids are often disinterred from days of childhood. At one time, I recollect, we memorised historical dates and events by repeating to ourselves phrases such as
“In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” I know many science graduates who gained mastery over their bewildering and increasing masses of technical abbreviations by turning the words or initials into a jingle that they could memorise.

The warder of the brain, indeed, is a fascinating and limitless faculty. We neglect it at our peril.

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