Change Your Brain Every Day - Can a Damaged Brain Be Repaired?

Episode Date: February 6, 2017

Today's episode, we're going to answer another set of questions that I think is essential for our understanding of our brain health. Please be sure that you subscribe so you don't miss out any of the new episodes we release everyday, except Sunday.  

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Hi. us. Well, then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen. Hi, my name is Linda. And Dr. Amen, I thought that the brain was fixed. And if it got hurt, it couldn't be repaired. Are you suggesting something different? I am. In fact, most people still believe that, that if you hurt the brain or you have a brain injury, there's no way to repair it. What we've seen is that's just not right. It was more than 10 years ago, neuroscientists found that certain areas of the brain actually could grow new neurons.

And one of those areas is called the hippocampus. So the hippocampus is in your temporal lobes, which are underneath your temples and behind your eyes. And they're the first area of the brain that starts to die in Alzheimer's disease. And we know stress hurts cells there. Trauma can hurt cells there. Toxins can hurt cells there. But when you exercise, when you really get on brain healthy diet, taking some simple supplements. We've seen significant improvements in that area. And then in the show, I was so excited to tell the story. In fact, I just learned about it from one of my patients. His hippocampus was only 4% of what it should have been. That's terrible.

That means he's on the downhill slide for dementia and he's running a big company. So, I mean, you can see that the whole company will suffer because his decisions won't be good because he won't remember from, you know, day to day what he's been thinking. But he got serious. So he saw a scan, developed brain envy, got serious, you know, got the message. And a year later, when he was re-scanned, that same area that was 4% was now 45%, which is a thousand percent improvement. It's like, well, how exciting is that, that your brain is not fixed? So our big NFL study, which, you know, I'm so excited about, you know, I initially decided

to do this study because I was unhappy with the NFL. They were acting like they didn't have a big problem with brain injuries. And I had seen too many people like Anthony Davis come to me with clear evidence of damage. And so we did our study and proved, I think, very convincingly that if you play football in the NFL, you're very likely to have issues with brain trauma. But what we didn't know when we started it is if you took this group of brain-damaged people who had very high levels of depression and dementia, obesity, sleep apnea, diabetes, and put them on this program, the same program that I talk about in this show,

that 80% of them showed improvement. We found, and we published this study this year, that their prefrontal cortex, so your prefrontal cortex, that front part of your brain, is your supervisor. It watches you. It helps you with things like forethought and judgment, impulse control, planning, empathy, insight. I mean, some really important stuff. And we found that on our program, in as little as two months, players started to show dramatic improvements. One of our players improved. His memory was at the fifth percentile. That meant 95% of people scored better than he did.

And he was a Stanford graduate, so he wasn't a dumb jock. And after being on the program, he scored at the 53rd percentile. Again, a thousand percent improvement. Your brain can change. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. Hi, Dr. Eamon. My name is Diane.

Can you tell me what the best supplements for my brain are? You know, I get asked this question all the time. You know, what supplements? Now, you heard me say in the show, if you're just going to do supplements instead of change your life, it's not nearly as effective. But just like I said in the show, multiple vitamin, and there's a group of new studies now that say people who have significant memory problems, that just taking, you know, reasonable levels of reasonable levels of the B vitamins significantly improve their memory and slow memory loss. So multiple vitamin fish oil has anti-inflammatory

effect, can boost your mood, helps your joints, helps your heart. And I talked about never let anything decrease blood flow in your brain. Well, heart disease does that because if you have heart disease, likely you also have vascular disease and your brain gets 20% of the blood flow in your body. So multiple vitamin, fish oil, know and optimize your vitamin D level. Because when vitamin D levels go low, higher risk of dementia, depression, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity. I'm absolutely convinced that my appetite went away in part. I measured my vitamin D level. It was terrible. And you know, I live in Southern California where it's sunny all the time, but I'm not out in the sun, I'm working. And when I really got my vitamin D level up

was when my appetite also went down. So how much should you take? I think everybody should take at least 2,000 international units a day. But hear me clearly, you should get it tested and then determine how much you take. So I take 10,000 international units a day and that gets me a high normal level. If you don't need that much, I don't want you to take it because you can have too much. That makes sense? And then what we put together for our NFL

protocol was two things for blood flow, ginkgo and venpocetine. They both boost blood flow in the brain. Two things to boost acetylcholine, which is the major memory neurotransmitter in the brain, acetylalcarnitine and uprazine A, which is a Chinese moss extract. We also gave them alpha lipoic acid because it helps stabilize blood sugar, which helps make you smarter, and acetylcysteine, which is a super antioxidant. So we put that combination together and it's just made a really wonderful difference. And we actually put it into a supplement that we now have at the Amen Clinics called Brain and Memory Power Boost. Thank you. My name is Julie, and I want to thank you for helping me change my brain. And my husband, I want to thank you for helping me change my brain.

And my husband, Josh, also thanks you for helping me change my brain. And I'd like to know the connection between heart disease and depression, if you could explain more about that for us. Oh, it's so interesting and painful for me, you know, as I think about my own grandfather. In fact, I was a medical student when he died. And it was shortly after he died, I learned about the connection, which just made me really sad. It's inflammation, we think. So that if you have heart disease, it's obvious that the blood vessels in your body are diseased. Well, if they're diseased in your chest, likely they're also diseased in your brain. You know, your brain and your heart really should not be divorced from each other.

I mean, it's all in one environment. And if people get depressed after they have a heart attack, it dramatically increases their risk of dying early. A brand new study just came out that if you get depressed, if you have problems with depression, you're at much higher risk of getting a stroke, which is another blood vessel disease. And we have, you know, it's like 20 million Americans

at any one point in time suffer from depression, that it's really a national crisis that we should be aggressively treating because if you're depressed, you're more likely to be obese. If you're depressed, you're more likely to get Alzheimer's disease. If you're depressed, you're more likely to have diabetes. We need to aggressively treat the problem with depression, but you don't necessarily have to start with an antidepressant. You need to optimize vitamin D level. You need to take fish oil, take multiple vitamins, exercise. There's one study that compared exercise with one of our classic antidepressants, and after 12 weeks, they were equally effective. And after 10 months, exercise

was more effective than the antidepressant. So I don't know about you, but what do you have after 12 weeks of an antidepressant? 60% to 80% of people have sexual side effects, which I'm just not okay with. I mean, I want my patients to have more love, not less love. But after 12 weeks of exercise, you're less depressed, you have a better body. You're more likely to be more sexual in a good way. Thank you so much for, you have a better body. You're more likely to be more sexual in a good way. Thank you so much for everything you do. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana

have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.