Change Your Brain Every Day - Is It Possible to Stop Cognitive Decline? With Dr. Dale Bredesen

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Dr Dale Bredesen sits down with Dr Daniel and Tana Amen to discuss the serious threat Alzheimer's disease still represents to the world’s population. Bredesen shares how difficult getting a simple trial approved by the Institutional Review Board can be and how some groundbreaking work is being overshadowed, thanks to corporate interest.

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 Warriors 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 amenclinics.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 everyone. We are so excited to have Dr. Dale Bredesen back with us. He's one of our most popular podcast guests. And I think it's because he is a purveyor of rational hope. And he, the author of the international bestseller book, The End of Alzheimer's, there's The End of Alzheimer's Program. He published a study showing that you could reverse Alzheimer's. That was huge. It got international press. And I just love him. I love his work. And at a time of pandemic, when the isolation, which we know, Dale, is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, the chronic stress, the people gained weight during this time. How do people manage their brains during a pandemic? You know, that's a great point. And it's always great to talk to you too.

And as you indicated, people get what's called a COVID cushion. They get that extra 10 or 20 pounds with COVID-19 as they're sitting inside. And, you know, many of us are doing a little worry eating and the social isolation. And, you know, we saw this on the trial that we just finished. We had a very exciting trial finished in December, and many people would improve. And then toward the end of it, as COVID hit, we were toward the end of our trial, people would have a little fall off at the end because of all these things. As you know, there's more depression. There's more anxiety.

I mean, this is your area of great expertise. So I think you're right. I think that you have to, essentially, we're changing the way we think about living on a day-to-day basis. Even though we may be sheltering in place and social distancing, we're able to do more family things. We're able to do more with our pod, with our group. We're able to get out there.

I find, you know, don't have to fly as much as I used to. Get out there and been playing some pickleball with the family. Get out there and hit some tennis balls. Get out there and do some biking and some swimming and all the things that you And you're right, you do have to spend more time thinking about what you're putting in your mouth. No question about it. And I think one of the things that's helped is all of the wearables, all of the quantified self. It is a time when you can follow yourself. And it's even more important to get that feedback, whether you like to use Oura Ring, whether you like to use, I like my Apple Watch, so check my heart rate variability every day. I can check how much sleep I've been doing and do the breathe exercise several times a day, whether you like meditation. I think there are so many things, but you're absolutely right. You have to think about this.

You have to think actively about prevention and about supporting your own cognition. And with many of the things that you and Tana have talked about in your books over the years. I know our work dovetails so beautifully. And I think the hope is, is you could, you should be on an Alzheimer's prevention program from before conception, ultimately before conception, right? But embedding your ideas into society as early as possible. One of the things we talked about before we came on was my work with NFL players, that so many of them, they don't want to come and get scanned, because they don't want to know, because they're so worried about ending up with CTE or chronic. Well, somehow they think not knowing is going to make it better, which well, and that's so true with Alzheimer's disease. And the fact is, if you're going to play a brain

damaging sport or work in a brain damaging profession, you should be doing prevention as soon as you start that. And given the numbers, Alzheimer's is expected to triple in the next 25, 30 years. Isn't that the statistic? Absolutely. And I think a statistic that really has impressed me is that if you look at the horror of COVID-19, it has now killed over half a million people, nearly 100 times the number of people who have been killed by COVID so far will die of Alzheimer's, the currently living Americans. So it's about 15% of the population that died. So as large as the COVID-19 pandemic has been, the Alzheimer's pandemic dwarfs it in terms of the numbers. Now, of course, it's not as quick. It's over time. So people tend to forget about it. But many, many more of the currently living Americans will die from Alzheimer's

than from COVID-19. So you're absolutely right. People should be on prevention for years ahead of time. And you know, Daniel and Tana, the thing that happens is the experts tell people, you know, there's nothing you can do about CTE and there's nothing you can do about Alzheimer's. So therefore, don't find out. And that's one of the reasons that people stick their heads in the sand. And if we could get everybody to come and find out, get on that prevention, or if you've already started down the, if you've already started with symptoms, get on, get on reversal, do it early. With the trial, we found that everybody could improve. The only ones who didn't were the ones who were very far along and who simply wouldn't do the appropriate things. We had one person who just wouldn't get out of a house that had massive mycotoxins, for example.

So the bottom line is there is a tremendous amount you can do. And that's the word that needs to get out to everybody who plays football, everyone who has head trauma, everyone who has at risk for Alzheimer's disease. Dr. John Kroger Talk about the trial. I know it's not published yet, but you finished it, you said, in December? Dr. David Jockers Yeah, we just finished in December. What's that? Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek I said, how exciting. Dr. John Kroger Yes. So this has been a while in the making. So as you can imagine, so we were working actually back in the lab back in 2011, we realized when we had developed

it and we've developed a drug that looked very nice, that looked like it changed this ratio of the synaptoclastic peptides, the ones that are causing pullback to the synaptoblastic peptides, the ones that were actually allowing you to make and keep new connections. We were very excited about that. And so we thought, okay, great. We want to test this drug, but then we realized, okay, wait, there are all these other pathways. We're really going to have to do a very comprehensive trial. So we proposed the first comprehensive trial back in 2011, and we were turned down by the IRBs. They said, you can't do a multivariable trial. It's got to be one thing. We said, well, wait, wait a minute. This is not a one thing disease.

So we thought, okay, we've got to put together anecdotes. And then Daniel, just as you said, we started publishing the anecdotes. 2014, 2016, 2018, we published 100 examples with documented improvement. And then in 2018, after those 100, we went back and we got turned down again by the IRBs because everybody wants you to do these single variable trials, which really doesn't make sense. Finally, 2019, we got okayed for a small proof of concept trial. This will now lead to a much bigger trial. So this first one was just 25 people, but we very extensively evaluated each one. And you flip the script just as you do with your NFL players that you've looked at.

You're flipping the script to say, instead of predetermining a treatment, which really makes no sense in cognitive decline, why give everyone the exact same thing? We're saying, why did each person get this? In some cases, it was their leaky gut. In some cases, it was metabolic syndrome. In some cases, a number of these people had mycotoxins. Some of them had tick-borne illnesses. You've got to, as you well know, you've got to address the things that are causing it. So we did that for all these 25 people. They had extensive evaluations. They went on a precision medicine protocol, we finished in December, and the vast majority of them showed an improvement. And I want to make

one important point here. There was a huge announcement three weeks ago from Eli Lilly, in which they said, we didn't make people better with our drug, Donenumab, we didn't even stabilize people, but we slowed the decline by one third. And in one day, the stock for that company rose by $20 billion for the total value of the company because of saying we slowed it by one third. Well, our results were far, far superior that we're making people actually better. So that's what that tells me. What that tells me is people are desperate they're looking for hope and we just have to make

sure that the message we have you're not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better with a comprehensive program that we just have to keep hammering that over and over again. We got to go to the next podcast, but we are so grateful. We're with Dr. Dale Bredesen, the author of The End of Alzheimer's and The End of Alzheimer's Program. We have a new book coming out in August. What's that called again? It's called The First Survivors of Alzheimer's. Great stories from seven people. They wrote their own stories. Just fantastic. Yeah.

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