Change Your Brain Every Day - Concussion Rescue: What to Do to Heal Your Brain, with Dr. Kabran Chapek

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

If you’ve suffered a head injury, or even if you’ve developed some bad habits over the years, your brain will need to heal in order to function at max capacity once again. So what can you do to heal your brain? In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are again joined by Dr. Kabran Chapek to discuss the risk factors for brain health issues and how to address them.

We are going to start your new year, your new decade off with a bang. Tan and I are going to do a six-week live class. So starting January 21st, every Tuesday, we're going to be with you for an hour. And at the end, we're going to give away over $20,000 in prizes. We look forward to helping you kick off this new year by becoming brain health revolutionaries. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain

Warrior's Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amonclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We're here with Dr. Kabran Chapik, and we're talking about traumatic brain injury, concussions, his new book, Concussion Rescue. Kabran, you and I have shared a lot of patients over the last six years, and I'm always very grateful for you because I help with the psychiatric stuff and you make sure to put their body in a healing environment.

And together we created the mnemonic Bright Minds, which is really a functional medicine approach to mental health, brain health. And we have talked about bright minds a lot but go through each of those risk factors as it relates to concussion rescue so b is for blood flow and we see that on the scans right we see low blood flow 91% of the time in the frontal lobes, which that just hurts everything in your life because it hurts decision-making. That's a brilliant mnemonic. And the more I use it with patients, the more sense it makes as we apply it to the different conditions that we see. And so, of course, blood flow. Yeah, the vascularization,

we need more blood flow if there's been a brain injury. The R is for retirement. And as an aging brain, as I said earlier, highest rates of brain injury are those either young adults, 0 to 17, and then over 65. And the brain is more vulnerable but there's also falls are higher in these populations i is for inflammation uh as we talked earlier there's a cascade of inflammatory events that's like a fire that hasn't been put out and continues to smolder for months and sometimes years after brain injury genetics so learn this from you this from you. ApoE4, people who have the ApoE4 genotype are more likely to suffer long-term consequences of brain injury because the ApoE4 allele is a gene. It's known as the Alzheimer's gene. But what it really means is

that this person who has ApoE4 is more pro-inflammatory. They're going to have more inflammation in their body than someone who doesn't. And so it's just that's so much more important to do all of the things we're talking about. So get this, Cabran. In 2004, I wrote my book, Preventing Alzheimer's, with neurologist Rod Schenkel. And when I reviewed that literature, Rod and I came out and said, if you're going to let your child play a contact sport, you first need to know their ApoE4 status. So it's just a simple blood test that, you know, ApoE gene type, so A-P-O gene type,

and it'll tell you, are you an E2? So it's two, three, or four. Do you have two twos, two threes, two fours? And if you have one four, you probably shouldn't let your child play contact sports because there was a study in boxers. Those boxers who had one of the E4 genes started to show cognitive impairment after their 11th fight. Those boxers who had no E4 genes actually did not show cognitive impairment until after their 30th fight. It's because they're producing more inflammation faster is that well and it's also involved in cholesterol metabolism uh as well but it increases the risk of cognitive impairment with whatever insult you have and i would bet because we've also been talking about general anesthesia people don't know this general anesthesia for vulnerable people, it's a brain injury. It's an assault on their brain.

And probably people of the four gene have more damage from anesthesia. And these risk factors stack. They link, they stack, and then they attack you. And so low blood flow. If you're older, that's worse. If you have inflammation because you have a highly processed diet, if you have genetic vulnerabilities

for anxiety, depression, Alzheimer's disease, the E4 gene. So recovery is really dealing with all of that. And then the T is toxins, which I actually learned from your mentor, Joe Pizzorno. He's got this great book, The Toxin Solution to Scare the Socks Off. Yeah, he's great. But we really live in a toxic environment, don't we? We do.

We do. We're kind of surrounded, kind of bathed in it so we all need to do things that help us detoxify whether it's doing saunas regularly or taking our antioxidants vitamin c uh eating our vegetables but where does uh hyperbaric oxygen fall in here so blood flow i'm so happy you brought that up i mean i got one in my house because like i'm so in love with it i go in every day it's when i meditate it just clears my brain so it just is so peaceful um and i know it's doing something positive if i had one if i could only do one thing to help heal the brain from brain injury it would be hyperbaric oxygen which i. The trial is only limited to one tool. It's that powerful.

And it doesn't help everyone. And it doesn't help as much if you just do that. But it is a powerful tool. But if you combine it with the rest of your protocol, then it's very powerful. That much better. And so M is either mind storms, these abnormal electrical activity,

common in head injuries because the temporal lobes where they come from sit right behind a sharp bony ridge that needs a bumper guard. So I'm praying for that. Or mental health challenges. If you have ADD, you're more likely to get a brain injury because of the impulsivity. As we talk about Haven, my granddaughter, I mean, I don't know that she has ADD, but it wouldn't surprise me how busy she is. She's like a wind-up toy. The impulsivity increases the risk of brain injury. But if you never had ADD until the car accident you got into when you were a teenager. And now you have ADD.

That's not really ADD. That's traumatic brain injury where you have frontal lobe trouble. I had a nurse who, or she wanted to become a nurse. Name was Jane. We'll call her Jane. She was 35 and she thought she had adult ADD, but she had been in a car accident and she had difficulty focusing, was given dexedrine as stimulant, helped a little bit, but she couldn't study until she got treatment for

also her brain injury. And then she could focus and study and was able to complete nursing school. So important. And then the I is immunity and infections which you and i have seen is so important but some autoimmune problems are really caused by gluten and dairy and corn and soy so doing an elimination diet can actually be really i mean diet's just a central piece to all of this. And then, you know, hormones. So, Anne is neurohormone deficiencies. And you write about that in Concussion Rescue about how testosterone, progesterone, thyroid can all be off after a head injury. Why is that? Yeah, great question. So 25 to 50% of people with the history of brain injury have damage to the pituitary gland. It's the master hormone gland sitting in the center of the brain, in the cellotersica, the sort of bony pocket. And

it can be damaged through the same ways other parts of the brain can be damaged and if it's taken out it's not sending the signal to the other parts of the other hormone systems so thyroid adrenals the testes for testosterone for women ovaries estrogen progesterone and also growth hormones so the top, we typically see growth hormone deficiencies and sex hormone deficiencies, whether that's testosterone or estrogen, progesterone. And this is especially high in the veterans with blast injuries. So I think that concussive force gets to the pituitary in particular, it can penetrate more deeply. So it's important to screen. And I talk about all the labs that should be done in the book, but checking all of these

hormones, but also the pituitary hormones, because they're often damaged. And these can be corrected. And it's like, we need those growth factors. That's how I characterize them. These are growth factors for healing. We have the nutrients for antioxidants and feeding the system that way, but then also we need to have the growth factors for healing as well with the hormones. It's like two halves of a coin. So important to get your hormones checked. And then D is diabes diabetes. 70% of us are overweight. 40% of us are obese. I've published two studies that show as your weight goes up, the size and function of your brain goes down. So you're more likely to have lasting trouble

if you have trouble with your weight. And you're more likely to have problems with your weight after a head injury. Because if 91% of head injuries affect your frontal lobes then you know in our society with this incredibly bad food you're just going to make a bad decision and just think about it when you think about the magnitude of this problem, every year, what did you say? Three million people go to the ER for a head injury. And most of them live. And that means over the last 40 years, there may be over 100 million people walking around with the effects of concussions.

And Daniel, I think it's so much higher because those are just the people going to the ER. Right, I was going to say, a lot of people don't go. Homeless people don't go. Like you didn't go and you had a very brutal car accident. And people don't think of the whiplash injuries. It's like, they think of that as a neck issue. Well, what's happening in your skull

where your brain is not fixed it floats in water i want to correct that i actually did go we had to because we were our car stopped whatever they took us to a local we were in the middle of nowhere they took us this little tiny tiny um hospital and he checked out the rest of my body make sure i didn't have any broken bones he quickly flashed my eyes, and that was it. I was done. And I thought, well, I'm fine. I walked away, so, you know.

I think you're fine. That's very common. So it's not that I didn't go. It's that it wasn't taken very seriously because I walked away. No, they still don't take it seriously. And when you come back, we we come back, we'll talk more about it. I mean, we can talk on and on. But Dr. Chapik's

new book, Concussion Rescue, out January 28th. He's going to have a new course coming out shortly thereafter at Amen University. I'm so excited about the course to help people with the book. Stay with us. It's a resource to save your brain and your life. considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD,

you can use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.