Change Your Brain Every Day - Are You At Risk For Alzheimer’s Disease? Part 3 with Dr. Dale Bredesen

Episode Date: November 9, 2017

In the third and final episode of a series with Dr. Dale Bredesen, author of the new best-selling book “The End of Alzheimer’s,” Dr. Daniel Amen and Bredesen talk about the risk factors for Alzheimer’s and Dementia. By attacking all of these major risk factors, you are putting yourself in the best possible place to avoid cognitive troubles down the road.

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'm Dr. Daniel Amen. Unfortunately, Tana is not with me today. I have a very special guest, Dr. Dale Bredesen. We're going to talk about his new book, The End of Alzheimer's Disease. So in memory rescue, and I love the parallels with that and end of Alzheimer's, even though we came to what I think is a very similar conclusion,

but by different routes. I developed this mnemonic called Bright Minds, which highlight the 11 major risk factors that steal your brain. And actually, in the book, I list 36 of them. And there's a lot of overlap. But let's just, from a practical standpoint, talk about each one quickly. So B is for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. And there are actually studies that show you can predict it more than a decade before someone actually has symptoms. And the things that steal blood flow, hypertension, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, although they tend to just go together, lack of exercise, caffeine constricts blood flow as does nicotine. Yeah, these are all critical, no question about

it. And healthy nitric oxide produced by your own body for your vessels, a good thing, as you know. And so no question, blood flow is a critical determinant. And of course, you can either go toward vascular dementia, so-called, or Alzheimer's disease. These are cousins. These are related entities. And they live in the same home. If you go to dinner, you're going to see both of them a lot in the same person, which is what we do. So exercise, obviously treat heart disease and hypertension, beets, cayenne pepper, ginkgo, and venpocetine. It's funny, the prettiest brains, the blood flow scans we do, I've ever seen are scans, people that take ginkgo. Isn't that interesting? Right.

I mean, by itself, I mean, and this is the whole point of the end of Alzheimer's. By itself, Ginkgo, vitamin E, fish oil, phosphatidylserine, whatever is not going to work because it's not a single cause illness. Yes. And as you pointed out, very interesting. The NIH spent $25 million on a single trial in which Ginkgo was used by itself. And, you know, they're not, you're not looking at the actual biology of the disease. I think Ginkgo can be very helpful, just as you said, but as a monotherapy, we're asking too much of these different drugs. And I actually have a piece in the book where we go through what a single drug would have to do if it were going to

be a cure for Alzheimer's. And there are over a hundred different things that it has to do. So we're asking too much. Get yourself an entire program and include the Ginkgo and you'll be much better off. Right. It's a multiple mechanism illness and you need to fight the war on multiple fronts. So the R in Bright Minds is retirement and aging. As you stop learning, your brain starts dying. But also there is high levels of ferritin, which people don't really think about. It's one of the reasons to avoid red meat if your ferritin levels are high, or to eat red meat if your ferritin levels are low, because low iron, you can't think. You become anemic. You're tired.

High, it gives you heart disease, inflammation, and it'll kill you early. Yep. As Bruce Ames has pointed out, when you get anemic, you start damaging your mitochondria before you even have anemia. So as your ferritin begins to drop, you have suboptimal function of your mitochondria.

But a lot of people have too high levels. And I'm like, well, how do you lower it? And I was at the spice market in Istanbul. And they were selling leeches outside the spice market. And I looked at my wife, I'm like, why are they selling leeches? And she goes, well, they bleed people, they think it's, it's, you know, it's like a health fat. And it actually works. Now, I prefer donating blood than having pet leeches. But for people who have high ferritin levels, you need to be careful about the iron in your diet. And then new learning is just absolutely essential.

The I is inflammation, which we already talked about. I like, you have to find the cause, but omega-3 fatty acids can be help and then be on an anti-inflammatory diet, which is really a plant-based diet. And of course, there are now resolvents. You can also resolve the inflammation initially with these specialized pro- mediators which are now available but then as i said before find out what's causing your inflammation and get rid of that the g is genetics and i love this part is that having the genes that put you at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease is not a death sentence. It should be a wake-up call. And the most important intervention under that is you need to be serious.

Rather than some people will develop a laissez-faire attitude. You know, it's in my family. I can't do anything about it. Which they do for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and so on. I have fat people in my family. I took a genetic test once and said I had a 67% chance of being obese, but I'm not because I don't engage in the behaviors that make it likely so. But it's a war, right? I mean, I will look at a cupcake and gain a pound. So you just have to be purposeful and whatever. And we're all at genetic risk for something.

You just have to be more purposeful. You know, and the old fashioned idea was don't find out your ApoE status because there's nothing you can do about it. And that is absolutely wrong. And so everybody should know their genetic status because there's a tremendous amount you can do about it. I got into an academic food fight once because I was talking about how scans can help predict Alzheimer's up to 10 years earlier. And this one guy from St. Louis University said, well, why would you want to know if there's nothing you could do about it? But GE actually published a study and showed 75% of the population would want to know, even if they couldn't do

anything about it. But what both you and I know is there's all sorts of things you can do about it. So the H in bright minds is head trauma. I think that should be your fourth type. We did the big NFL study at a time when the NFL was lying. They had a problem. And they don't have Alzheimer's disease. The NFL players with dementia, they have frontal temporal lobe dementia secondary to head trauma. Your brain is soft about the consistency of soft butter and your skull's hard and it has sharp bony ridges. Repetitive brain injuries are just a bad idea. Yeah, this is a very good point. And actually I wrote about the three types in the book,

but yes, there's also a fourth and fifth, as you know, the bad diets, the lack of exercise, the addiction to gadgets, so they're not learning new things or having to stress their brains. The T... So the seeds of our longevity when we are young. The T in Bright Minds is toxins. So we've talked about that a little bit. But when I first started doing imaging, I was the director of a dual diagnosis unit,

which is a psychiatric hospital unit that takes care of drug addicts. And their scans were so bad. And I brought the bad scans home to my children and effectively induced anxiety disorders in all four of them about substance abuse. And that's why I've always been suspicious of marijuana is good for your brain. We just published a study on a thousand pot smokers showing every area of the brain was lower especially the hippocampus and then i'm suspicious about the alcohol uh research just because you

know in our experience our database now is at 130 000 scans and my the people who drink every day have overall less activity than people who don't. And alcohol is related to seven different kinds of cancer. And chemotherapy is bad for your brain. And so in my mind, less is better. But I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. I spoke at the Alzheimer's Association here in Orange County, and they had alcohol as one of the refreshments.

And, you know, I'm always polite when I go places, but internally I was like, seriously? You know, we don't love our brains as much as we should. It's a really good point. And then for so many people, this is an important part of their lives. And of course, without it, there's an increase in cortisol. So I think you have to kind of balance it. If you're going to have a lot of cortisol without it, as you know, high cortisol bad for your hippocampus as well. So we recommend keep it down, keep it down to a, you know, a half a glass of wine or a glass of wine, you know, two or three times a week, and it's probably not going to hurt you.

And it may relax you a little. And along those same lines, what do you recommend as far as CBD oil? You know, there's a new study out of NYU showing it helped decrease seizure activity in children. It's not been legal long enough for us to really have good studies with it. And there's so many other things to help relax you. Both you and I are huge fans of meditation. I'm a huge fan of hypnosis and self-hypnosis I sort of it's one of the reasons I wanted to be a psychiatrist because I thought it was so interesting and my first four published papers were on hypnosis for a variety of conditions being purposeful I just interviewed someone who is a friend of Viktor Frankl. And stress tends to go down. You know, he survived the concentration camps

when you are an incredibly purposeful person. But I also like saffron, one of my favorite spices to improve your mood and decrease stress. Rallura is another one that blocks cortisol. is to improve your mood and decrease stress. Rolora is another one that blocks cortisol. I got interested in, you know, our listeners know, we founded BrainMD, our supplement company. And I got interested in it because a lot of the medications I'd use

to lower your stress and anxiety were just flat- out toxic for brain function. So whether it's Xanax or Ativan or Valium or Klonopin, it's very rare I prescribe them anymore because they cause overall decreased blood flow to your brain. And I always say as a psychiatrist that Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. It's brain envy. You need to care more about how that thing looks or how big that thing is. Yeah, look at the remarkable things you have with the herbs.

I mean, look what you have from, you know, Bacopa to Rhodiola to Horicium aranaceus to Ashwagandagandha these things can be very helpful and why are you out there prescribing a drug right at least you know i mean here at amen clinics we're not opposed to drugs we're just opposed to that's the first and only thing you do when there's so many other things and in our focus and energy formula we have rhodiola ginseng ashwagandha and green tea extract and it works so well it doesn't amp you like adderall it gives you focus while at the same time decreasing stress so you know i'm just a huge fan of other ways to think about helping people. The M in bright minds is mental health issues. I mean, we know depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, increase your risk for Alzheimer's disease, likely from the chronic stress associated with them. Absolutely. And then I...

Certainly a lot of people... Yeah, go ahead. I is immunity and infections. And I know that it's part of what you've seen as well. And in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, there was an editorial, and I think it was signed by 33 scientists that said, we're missing the boat. We need to be screening for infectious disease because it's a major cause of Alzheimer's disease. And here's the bottom line, biochemically, amyloid beta is part of the innate immune system response. So when you have Alzheimer's disease, you are saying, I have a chronic innate immune system response to something or some combination of things. So absolutely infection. It is the neurosyphilis of the 21st century. It's just

that there are many organisms that can lead to this instead of one. Well, and it's hard to screen for them in a cost-effective way because there's a lot of them that, you know, Lyme, which is often hard to detect, herpes virus, in fact, I was reading, if you have cold sores, of all things,

it increased your risk of Alzheimer's disease 20%. And it's another reason, you know, if I had to pick one immune enhancing tip, it would be optimize your vitamin D level. And what's interesting that there was a study published on people whose vitamin D level was above 40 compared to those that were below 20. And the people below 20 had more than double the risk of cancer. Wow. Yeah. No question. And some people like to use tinnospora, cordifolia. Some people like to use cat's claw. Some people like to use transfer factors, fulvic acid, whatever it is that you like to use to enhance your immunological status.

And again, you know, the best thing you can do is getting some sleep, living a good life and, you know, having the right foods and nutrition, whatever it is, this is a critical piece to prevent this problem we call Alzheimer's disease with the innate immune system activation chronically. The N is neurohormone deficiencies. And I think you talked about that in trophic, you know, one of the trophic causes if you're, and you know, one of the most interesting things I've learned, and I think, you know mark gordon is in my nfl study all these guys had terribly low testosterone levels and i'm like how's that i mean you know these are you know monsters uh who you know you think of as being the most manly men on the planet. But when you rattle your brain repeatedly, it can damage your pituitary gland

and alter your hormone levels in your body. No question. You are damaging that axis. The D is diabesity. First time I heard it was from Mark Hyman. Mark and I wrote the Daniel Plan together with Pastor Rick Warren. And so I've been following Mark's work for a long time. And it's that combination of diabetes and obesity. And what I learned in Joe Pizzorno's book, The Toxin Solution, was it's not just food that causes diabetes. It's the toxic load we have that damages the pancreas and makes us more likely to be overweight and diabetic. Exactly. It's that horrible combination. And as you indicate,

diabetes is one of the most important risk factors for dementia. Wow. And it's one of your subtypes. I mean, it's just so critical. And that's why when you, when you just look around, go to the mall and you see the number of people who are overweight or obese, it's horrifying. And then,. And then if you walk around the restaurants or the food courts and you watch what people are eating, it just is horrifying. And we've grown up not thinking about this it's just standard to see people eating all these processed foods and unfortunately you know it's just like the old days many many

years ago when people thought yeah smoking you know how much could it hurt you well it turns out to be bad and so does most of the food we're eating that's a great analogy and then s is sleep uh and you know how i got interested in sleep well you read the studies people get less than seven hours of sleep at night have lower overall blood flow to your frontal lobes so that's a bad thing you know that's the part of your brain that stops you from saying or doing stupid things right and so we all know people who have decreased inhibition. I was at a conference once with a friend of mine who'd been in a bad accident, but she was all better, what everybody said,

but she had no filter. And two overweight women in front of us were talking about why they were overweight. And one looked at the other and said, I don't know why I'm overweight. I just eat like a bird. And my friend, so everybody around us could hear, said, yeah, like a condor. And I looked at her her and I turned red. I was so embarrassed. And she put her hand over her mouth and she said, oh no, did that get out? Yeah. Yeah. It's a very good point that frontal lobes are critical for that filter.

Right. And so if you don't sleep, your frontal lobes are low, which means you're going to eat more. Your decision-making will not be as good. And then I began to see, so on SPECT, and this was published in the late 80s, decreased parietal temporal lobe hypoperfusion. So decreased blood flow to the parietal lobes, top back part of your brain, and decreased blood flow to the parietal lobes, top back part of your brain,

and decrease blood flow to the hippocampus on the medial temporal lobes. And so that's not a new finding. It's been published. It's been replicated. It's even been shown in subjects who later died that had autopsies. But i i started seeing saddling or decreased perfusion in the parietal lobes and i'm like why is that and then there was a paper that came out on sleep apnea causing that saddling and then it turns out sleep apnea is actually a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease because your brain's the most metabolically active organ. And if it has an oxygen debt, it's going to kill it. So it's a good point. Sleep is just absolutely essential.

So let me ask you a question, Daniel. We see people who have more of a type 3 or toxin presentation as having a cortical, typically biparietal syndrome, non-amnestic, whereas the people that have more the type 1 and type 2, the inflammatory, and especially the atrophic, as having a predominantly hippocampal and amnestic presentation. Very different looking people. Do you see differences like that on your spec scans? We do. In fact, you know, I mean, we've done 25 or 30 of them together. Be interesting, you know, clearly to do more when you have classic cases to go, what is the scan pattern look like? In the toxic pattern, what we see is a scalloping appearance overall. And it's not hard to see in the 3D renderings we do.

It's like there is a toxic pattern. It's this overall bumpy decreased blood flow but less likely to be focal to an area like the hippocampus and so um so i i think we would see a difference um you'll like this we just remodeled our house and in in the shower, my wife put two seahorses. Because in memory rescue, I talk about, you know, you have to love your seahorses because you're making baby seahorses all the time. Well, you know, I couldn't be more grateful for your work, your friendship, your time. I'm thrilled for you that the end of Alzheimer's disease is becoming a huge success. And, uh, I'm right there, uh, with you wanting to tell our,

uh, listeners about it, uh, our, our community about it. And, uh, it. And it's Nobel Prize winning work. And I'm just proud to know you. Thank you very much, Daniel. I love the work you're doing. I look forward to more and I look forward to your upcoming book. This is very exciting stuff. And as you pointed out, you have the largest group of SPECT scans in the world. So you're going to be learning a tremendous amount from these. And we're going to learn on head trauma, on Alzheimer's, on other neurodegenerative conditions. We are truly at the dawn of the era of treatable neurodegenerative disease. So thank you very much, Daniel. Great.

Thanks, everybody. You're listening to The Brain Warrior's Way. Dale Bredesen. I'm Dr. Daniel, everybody. You're listening to The Brain Warrior's Way. Dale Bredesen. I'm Dr. Daniel Lehman. copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.