Change Your Brain Every Day - Could You Have a Brain Injury and Not Know It?

Episode Date: October 17, 2017

In Part 6 of the Memory Rescue series, the focus is on head trauma. Taking a bad fall or playing contact sports can lead to memory issues as you get older, and can leave many people with lasting damage that they may not realize is there. Learn the importance of protecting your head, and what you can do to help your brain if you’ve experienced head trauma.

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. Welcome back. We are in our memory rescue series. We're talking about how to have a bright mind. And today we're going to talk about the H in bright minds, which is head trauma. So B is for blood flow, R retirement and aging, I is for inflammation. We just got through genetics. H is for head trauma.

How often or how many times would you say on average you have to ask people if they've had a head trauma before they actually answer you? Well, let's talk about you. Me? Let's talk about you. Me? Let's talk about you. I wasn't talking about me. So, you know, a lot of people know that when we first met, I just really liked you a lot. Two weeks.

He wanted to see my brain naked. And the line was, hey, you haven't seen the clinic yet. Do you want to come see the clinic? Of course, I was trying to get a brain scan to see you know i really liked you and i wanted to know did i really want to like you and uh and i could see evidence of a brain injury on your scan and you went i never had a brain injury so i'm a neurosurgical icu nurse when you say brain injury to a neurosurgical ICU nurse, you know what the vision that comes to my mind is. It's like brain flap.

It's like skull missing. It's like brain drains. Yeah, I mean, yours was not minor. It wasn't you tripped. Yeah, I never lost consciousness. So in my mind, that's not- So tell everybody what you then told me- I was never diagnosed with a concussion.

After I asked you 10 times. Have you ever had a brain injury? No. Are you sure? No. Have you ever fallen out of a tree, off a fence, dove into a shell pool? No. Okay, he's making me tell.

Did you play sports? No. Well, I did. I was a cheerleader. Ah, well, cheerleader right away. The odds just went way up. And then I went, well, have you ever been in a car accident no oh well there was this one time and i just you know like my usual self i just paused and i said

well tell me about it okay just just so you don't make me sound really lame here i did not lose consciousness and i was not diagnosed with a concussion could you tell everybody about what happened yes my sister fell asleep at the wheel driving 75 miles an hour and she rolled the car not lose consciousness and I was not diagnosed with a concussion. Could you tell everybody about what happened? Yes. My sister fell asleep at the wheel driving 75 miles an hour and she rolled the car two and a half times and the roof caved in. And if you'd been sitting up, you would have been dead. I had the seat all the way back.

Yes. But I'm pretty sure my head hit the center console. But just think about the forces in your soft, soft butter-like brain housed in a really hard skull that has sharp bony ridges and 75 miles an hour flipping two and a half times and then stopping all of a sudden. What do you think, you think the forces inside your skull with your very pretty brain were like on a scale of 1 to 10? Was that like a 1? You know, maybe a 2? I was asleep. Thank God I was asleep. So I'm not exactly sure.

I mean, consciousness, you were not conscious. But that's a big deal. Now, we could see it on her scan, which scared me a little bit. Well, and I was so busy being grateful that I walked away from it that I was not even thinking back then, oh, probably I should be thinking brain injury. I was just like, yes, I walked away from this thing. And what we discovered here at Amen Clinics, and we're not the only ones that's talked about it, is undiagnosed brain injuries are a major cause of depression. They're a major cause of panic attacks, suicidal behavior, homelessness. There was a study out of Toronto, 42% of the homeless women had a significant brain injury before they were homeless 58 of the homeless men interesting

and so i would say the one thing that i've noticed since then if i had to really sort of analyze it less tolerance and didn't you say that you used to like know everybody's name yeah that's the other thing is like people's names so what's weird is i can take a medical class and like medical terminology and facts like scientific facts i don't forget people's names for some dumb reason i have trouble with people's names it's so weird so i have to like say them to myself three or four times before i'll remember it so it's very weird so having a head injury with or even without a loss of consciousness is a significant risk factor for memory loss, as is loss of sense of smell, which often comes after

a head injury. The labs to know whether or not you've had a significant head injury, brain spec imaging, spec is, you know, my mind, I'm completely biased because it's what we do. It's what we love. We built this massive database. I was shocked you could see it. Like, that was really cool. And it's just better than a CAT scan or an MRI. Doing smell tests.

Like, can you smell peanut butter? One of the fun ones, natural gas. If you can't smell the natural gas, you may never get dementia because you won't live long enough because you'll have died in the explosion at home. And having low hormone levels. So having significantly low hormone levels because often when you have a head injury, it damages the pituitary gland, which is sort of the master hormone gland in the brain. And I just have to tell you, after I started looking at scans,

that's a theme that came up over and over and over, the repetitive brain injuries that caused a lot of psychiatric symptoms. So I have a question. So we know, I mean, head injuries, they happen all the time. I mean, I'm not a football player, and I got a head injuries, they happen all the time. I mean, I'm not a football player and I got a head injury. Okay, so it happens. But it seems like, wow, I mean, kind of unfair. What are you going to do about that?

Rehabilitate it. Okay, so. I mean, that's, you know, here at Amen Clinics, starting in 2007 when Anthony Davis came to see us, he's the Hall of Fame running back from USC. At 54, his brain looked like it was 85 and it was bad for 85. And we put him on a rehabilitation program because that's what we do here at Amon Clinics. There's a reason I wrote a book called Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.

Of course. And, you know, Anthony, like Shailene, who we talked about in the last podcast, he's a high performance athlete. He's a runner up for the Heisman Trophy. And he liked being coach. Hey, doc, tell me what to do. I'll do what you tell me to do. And he just did everything. And five months later, his brain was better. We actually have a scan 10 years later. And it's better. And it's better, which just makes me so happy for him. And then he invited me to speak to the Los Angeles chapter of the Retired NFL Players Association.

And together, we put together our study that now has 200 players and cool people like Terry Bradshaw and Freddie Dreyer. And how do you make your brain better? So we know it's a risk factor for memory loss. But if you've had a head injury, a scan really helps understand where am I at. Right. And then we put them, because I paid for the rehabilitation study. So I'm like, well, what's the most cost-effective way I can get these people? Well, multiple vitamin with high doses of B6, B12, and folate. Right.

And the reason I had high doses of those three, in a number of studies, those doses were found to decrease the conversion of mild cognitive impairment to dementia. Oh, interesting. And I'm like, okay, I'm a fan. They're not going to hurt anybody. And high-dose fish oil. We use 5.6 grams of omega-3 power, which is four, of omega-3 power. And then brain and memory power boosts, which we designed for that study, which has seven different things to optimize brain function.

So sort of like in a bright minds approach, we went to want to attack the war on multiple fronts. See, that's the tricky part about being married to you, because you come home and you're like, here, sweetie, I want you to try this. And so I'm on all these things. So I'm on to you. I know what you're doing. I know, but we've also been together 12 years and it's true the best 12 years of our lives so let's keep it going

better brain better relationship talk to me about hyperbaric oxygen so for the players who we thought needed needed more we also put them in a hyperbaric chamber. So it depends on the severity. It depends on the severity. I'm just, I'm a huge fan. We actually recommend it to 25% of our patients because we found it to be so helpful. And I got interested in hyperbaric oxygen because my friend, Mike Usler, who's done spec scans longer than I have, There are not that many people on the planet. So at UCLA, he said, look at these scans before and after hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Right. And it increases blood flow to the brain.

Yeah, I try to do it. And ours is almost always full. Our chamber's almost always full. But I know we have one patient who I'm not going to mention names because it's very high profile patient, but who had severely traumatic birth process and was anoxic. Anoxia means lack of oxygen during birth and suffered a brain injury. I mean, head trauma because of that. So when I had trauma like injury, but like it was traumatic. So she has done, what, about 40 treatments. She won't stop simply because she says that while she's in the chamber, she feels like her whole life is just different,

like her whole outlook on life is better. Because she's getting better blood flow to her brain, which means you're absolutely thinking better. And at the end of the new PBS show coming out in December, Memory Rescue, we talk about Grace and Shannon, who we have on this podcast, where, I mean, literally saved her life. Now, obviously, the most important intervention, if you've had a head injury or if you've not had a head injury, is to prevent one. I mean, that's just the most important thing.

Don't text while you drive. Don't read your email while you're walking down Fifth Avenue. Be really careful at home not to fall. I mean, quite frankly, falls are one of the major causes of death in the elderly. We replaced our floors. You know, it's a huge hassle and it's expensive, but it's not as expensive as having slippery floors and falling. As we get older, you know, people think about hip replacements, but they don't think about head injuries. And both my mom

and her husband, who recently passed away, fell and had bad head injuries. And both of us are like, you know, we don't need slippery floors in our house. Right, we had marble floors. They were really slippery. And it used to scare me off to death because the kids would come running in from the pool and they wouldn't listen and just like take off darting across the floor.

And the trauma nurse in me is just like terrified all the time. So now we don't have floors that are slippery. We made sure we got rid of those slippery floors. And so even though the expense was there. So whatever you can do, and that's why when Caitlin, my third child, learned to drive, I made her drive my Escalade because I wanted steel around. I'm sure she hated that.

No, she did. She was like bothering me for a Volkswagen bug. Yeah, no, we're not all about that. No, you have to be protected. And I remember my son-in-law, he went four-wheeling in the desert, and he didn't tell me it was going ahead of time because he knew I would have been like, why are you going to do something so stupid?

And he had a bad accident. And his father, that same weekend, you know, they went together. He had a bad accident. And six months later. I forgot to tell you that I had one of those, too, when I was 15. I rolled one. It just occurred to me. Totally forgot about that.

All right. We need to talk about that. But Jesse's father had a bad accident. Six months later, he killed himself. And so this is serious. All of the, oh, Dr. Raymond, you're such a bummer. We want to do all these really great, fun, high-risk things. I'm like, not if you love yourself. There's so many great things you can do in life. You know, God gave you a big brain for a reason. You can generate options that are safe. Well, and if you are on our side of this and you constantly hear people say, if I could just go back, if I could just rewind the clock and take back that one thing, like the thing I thought

that I had to do, if I could just take back that one thing. So you begin to understand, I mean, believe me, I do lots of pretty cool, amazing things that seem like, oh my God, why is she doing that? Like they're kind of crazy, but none of them involve things that are what I would consider high risk for head injuries. You know what I mean? Like they're just- Well, if anything, you're trying to do the opposite by protecting yourself and so on. Anthony Davis. So played in the NFL, Hall of Fame in college. He said, if I had to do it over again, I would have played baseball. And you can still get a head injury in baseball, but it's not the point. The point of football is collision. And he would say on any one play, I'd get hit in the head five times, right? Because he had multiple people trying to tackle him and he was strong.

In different directions. Right. So you're going, yeah, those guys are huge. Yeah. So protect your brain. I remember when I spoke at the Future of Medicine conference, Kevin Plank, who's the CEO of Under Armour, came up after me, and they, you know, support the NFL and college. And he said, are you saying there's nothing good about football? And I said, brain is soft, skull is hard, skull has sharp bony ridges, damage your

brain, you damage your life. But are you saying there's nothing good about football? Brain is soft, skull is hard, skull has sharp bony ridges brain runs your life why would you ever put it in a place to damage you guys did not part and then he asked me the third time and i'm like did you play football i don't think you guys parted friends that day well you know the point wasn't to be friends or not it's why would you allow someone you love to play a game that could damage their brains and you're a you're a cheerleader right it's a very brain damaging and i was pretty small when i started they wanted me on the top but i'm not even then i'm like no because i saw them get dropped all the time i'm like I don't think I want to be on the top.

So I'm like, I'll be in the middle. And the female brain is different, right? We publish studies and we talk about it. The female brain, 90% of her IQ is in her frontal lobes. Yeah. Where for the male brain, it's more widely distributed. So a frontal lobe injury for a female is actually more devastating than it is for a male. Has more long-term, long-lasting effects. Negative consequences. But you can change it. And so we talked about our rehabilitation,

multiple vitamin, fish oil, brain boost through multiple mechanisms. And there are foods that can help, you know, obviously limit sugar, caffeine, alcohol, processed foods. So the goal here is to increase blood flow, right? Well, it's to increase actually multiple mechanisms, especially acetylcholine, because those tracks tend to be damaged. So choline-rich foods like eggs and shrimp can be really helpful. Turmeric, we've said that a couple of times. Decrease inflammation. And peppermint herbs have actually been shown in traumatic brain injury to be helpful.

But, you know, like with genetics, if you've had a head injury, you want to be serious about doing everything else right. Excellent. You can change your brain, change your life, take a bright minds approach, rescue your memory. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.