Change Your Brain Every Day - A Family Member of Mine Has Alzheimer’s Disease, Am I Next? With Leeza Gibbons

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen is joined by television personality Leeza Gibbons to discuss her advocacy for brain health. Leeza came into the space of brain health reluctantly, as her mother and grandmother both suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease. Learn the steps Leeza took to ensure she would not follow in those footsteps.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Hi, everybody. I am so excited this week because with us is my good friend, Lisa Gibbons, who I've adored for, we're just thinking about it, 20 years. Lisa is a very well-known television personality. She's an author.

Her latest book is Fierce Optimism. She founded Lisa's Care Connection. And I know many of you know her, but I had the opportunity to spend the day with her. I'm just grateful. Thank you. Welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way. This is really a wonderful opportunity. I've been such a fan, as you know, of your work for so long, even before you scanned my brain a decade ago. Wow. So you know me well, and you know my brain even better. I do. So I was on your show 1999 when my book Change Your Brain, Change Your Life came out and you said to me, so I read the book and there's 300 stories in here. Yes, right.

And, you know, there's just no end when it comes to the brain. And one of the things that you're really passionate about is Alzheimer's disease. Why? My mother and my grandmother both had Alzheimer's disease and died of complications from Alzheimer's. And so I became one of those reluctant recruits, many of whom become your patients, the worried well that we would call ourselves wanting to understand what my mother was going through and looking through a prism that didn't look so rosy of oh no does that mean I'm headed in that direction so wanting to really be a good caregiver for my mom you know like most people

your blind spot is what you don't know. And I didn't understand this very confounding brain disease. And your grandmother had it too. And what do you remember about that? I remember my mother, the first thing I remember about my grandmother was loving her so much, this vibrant Southern woman who was, you know, big bosoms, big laugh, big wonderful hugs, and she made great

biscuits. And the first time I remember knowing something was wrong with Granny was when she said, well, I can't find the biscuits. And I said, well, aren't they in the oven? And she found them in a dresser drawer in a bedroom. Oh, no. And that was the first sign that something's wrong with Granny. And then watching my mother care for her and argue with her sister, my aunt, about what was best for their mom and all of the struggles that many of you know very well about caregiving was so instructive to me, but I didn't know then, nor did I ever want to let myself believe that my mother would also walk that same path. She did. And when did you begin to notice it in your mother?

We thought that my mother was drinking too much, which I believe she was because I think she was self-medicating with wine because she was confused and she wasn't remembering things. I noticed her behavior change that I attributed to drinking too much and to slowing down. Like her life's not big enough and exciting enough. But she's the one, Daniel, who said, I paid this bill three times. Something is wrong. Wow. She lined us all up, my brother, my sister, my dad, myself, and she said, look, when I can no longer call you by name, I want you to, I don't want to live with you, first of

all. She gave us her marching orders. I don't want to live with you or your brother or your sister, and I want you to, I don't want to live with you, first of all. She gave us her marching orders. I don't want to live with you or your brother or your sister, and I want you kids to help Daddy know when it's time to let me go. And by that, she meant, because of her experience taking care of her mom, that she wanted to live in a residential community that was specially designed for people with memory loss. And so she picked out a place herself.

That's pretty remarkable. Well, you come from remarkable women. Thank you. I think that's certainly true. And what was going on inside you as you watched your grandmother and then you watched your mother. And was your mother in South Carolina? Yes.

My family is all still in South Carolina, as is a big part of my heart. The biggest moment of truth for me came at my granny's funeral. My mother had already been diagnosed, still functioning in the early stages, but she had dressed herself for the funeral that day. And as is very common, the buttons were wrong, her makeup wasn't quite right, and my mother was an impeccably beautiful woman. But she was struggling. And I looked at my mother, put her mother to rest. And that was the first

time that I went, wait, scratch this track. You know, you love looking at your legacy. You love looking at what you inherit from the generations that came before you, but no one wants to inherit this disease that steals your mind. And that was probably the first time that I felt the loneliness of loving someone with Alzheimer's. Say more about that. It's a very isolating disease, as you know. And until you're in the club that no one wants to, to which no one wants to belong, until you're in that group, you don't know that it feels so stigmatizing and so lonely. And there's so much negativity because it feels hopeless.

And honestly, that's why I love your work so much, because it is not hopeless. And that's part of my worldview, why I wrote Fierce Optimism. I believe in our ability to find ways to make the most of what we have. And when you love someone or care for someone with Alzheimer's, the caregiver often gets sick or fails at a faster rate and dies before their diagnosed loved one because the stress is so overwhelming. So one of the statistics I wrote about in Memory Rescue is 15% of the caregivers of people who have Alzheimer's disease have Alzheimer's or another form of dementia themselves.

And so getting consistent care is often really hard. And now an epidemic in our country is there are people by themselves. And so loneliness is massive. And it's actually one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease. But if you're headed to the dark place and your family's not there, and I did, you and I have talked about the big NFL study I did. And one of the things I learned, there's is very high

incidence of dementia in former football players. But often as they're going into a dementia place, they're angry, they're irritable, they're not as responsible because their brain's deteriorating. But their spouses misinterpret that as they don't love me anymore. I'm not important to them. They don't care. And so they actually go away and leaving these people sometimes on their own, which is a nightmare. A nightmare. Yeah. The lack of socialization is really, really a very difficult place. But the numbers in our society, Dr. Amen, are overwhelming. I mean, you say in the next 25 years, what will the rate be? It's going to triple.

Triple. Triple in 25 years. That's our lifetimes. Yeah. So it's almost 6 million people now and go up to 18 million. And I always say that this is a woman's disease because, as you know, women get diagnosed at a greater frequency than men, and women are more often the caregivers than men.

And it's such a conundrum. We don't really know why yet, do we? Well, we have some clues that when estrogen goes low blood flow to the brain goes low and so since male brains weren't birthed with much estrogen they're not as dependent on it and so there's there's clearly a hormonal piece to it. So when people express fear or concern about estrogen replacement being a cancer risk, you respond by saying what? Yes, if you take horse estrogens, it's a cancer risk, right? The women's health, the initiative study that came out goodness, almost 15 years ago, I think, and women just threw away the estrogen they were taking, but it was

synthetic estrogen and I have not seen an increased cancer risk with bioidentical hormones. Now it depends on what your genetics are and your risk for things like breast cancer and uterine cancer. But you have to weigh that against, well, what happens to my brain? Yeah. But hormones aren't the only factor. We'll talk about the 11 risk factors because they're so interesting and so important.

When we come back, we're going to talk about what Lisa has learned from her own brain and from her search on how to not have the same legacy of your grandmother and your mother. Great. Stay with us. Use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review

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