Change Your Brain Every Day - What Can You Do To Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease? With Dr. Dale Bredesen

Episode Date: April 6, 2021

Dr Bredesen chats about how modern gadgets are helping people track their mental health by monitoring critical information for people to know about themselves. He elaborates on how the current state of detecting Alzheimer’s disease is getting easier, but at the same time the age of the individuals affected is becoming  younger and younger.

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 back. We are still here with our friend and colleague, Dr. Dale Bredesen, talking about his amazing program, The End of Alzheimer's. He's got the book and the program. And I love, we were talking about your clinical trial in the last episode, Dr. Bredesen, and you talked about something, which I think, you know, we've been talking about for a long time, you've been talking about for a long time, but not a lot of people have been talking about for a long time. And it's really about treating the underlying causes that Alzheimer's isn't one thing. So I just I love this idea that, you know, to get people

well, we've got to treat the underlying causes rather than putting band aids over bullet holes, if you will, trying to use the shotgun effect. Well, and how do you know unless you look? You know, a major business principle is you can't change what you don't measure. And we, you know, it's why we do imaging because we're measuring. and I think in the research backs it up, we can tell years, maybe decades before you have any symptoms if your brain is headed for darkness and getting ready to publish a new study on happiness. And if you have low frontal lobe function, you're not happy. It's pretty clear brain health goes with happiness, but it also goes with memory. What are some of the important numbers you think people should know on a routine basis,

important health numbers? Yeah, well, I'd say, first of all, certainly agree with the point that Chana made that, you know, you really need to look at these things. You really need to go after what's causing it. As you said, there are critical numbers. And years ago, you know, you had the tremendous, you know, critical insight that with psychiatry, you're not looking at what actually changes. And the spec scans change that. So you can now actually see, you can see what COVID does, you can see what Alzheimer's does, and you can see it coming, which is really critical. And so we're doing very much the same

thing biochemically. So we want people to know what their TGF beta one is, because that is a critical piece for their, their product, their ability to deal with inflammation. We want them to know things like their HSCRP. We want them, and the good news is, by the way, there are so many of these wearables now that we can find out a number of these things. We want them to know how their sleep is going. We really, one of the most important things for people to know is their nocturnal oximetry. There's a beautiful study published just a couple of years ago showing if you simply take the mean

oxygen saturation the average through the night that correlates beautifully with the size of specific nuclei within your brain including your hippocampus so as your oxygenation goes down at night and unfortunately so many people don't check, your brain is shrinking. And that's a major issue. We'd like to know how do people check that. So people can do that a number of ways. You can either do it by with things like you do with an Apple watch that'll actually you wear that at night, it'll tell you what your oxygen status is while you're sleeping. You can do it with a simple oximeter, which you can buy inexpensively, or you can borrow from your physician. You can do it with a sleep study.

If there's any question about your sleeping, good idea to have a sleep study. They will check that for you. So there are numerous ways to do that. But one way or the other, critical to know that. And another critical thing to know is your oral microbiome. You know, of course, we talk so much now about the gut microbiome and how important it is, but of course also your sinus microbiome and your oral microbiome. And one of the things that's been found by the pathologists repeatedly in the

brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease is P. gingivalis, a specific bacterium from your mouth that actually gets into your brain. This all, by the way, also goes systemically. It is part of your cardiovascular disease. It can contribute to cancers. It's been remarkable. What's going on in your mouth, the inflammation that's going on, periodontitis, gingivitis, absolutely critical for your cognition and so therefore you can check this easily with an oral dna test you can look to see whether you have low levels of this in your microbiome or high levels and there are a few other bad bad ones t denticola p intermedia this is a prevotella species f nucleotide These are all the bad actors in your mouth that

can unfortunately get into your brain. And then, of course, toxic burden. And I know you've talked about that many times. So many of us have toxic burden, whether it's more on the metal, whether it's air pollution. And of course, here in California with the fires, huge issue with air pollution. You probably saw there was a, you probably saw, there was a follow-up study on the people who'd been in the World Trade Center. And they're now up to 14% of these people have cognitive decline because of the exposure to that air pollution, even though it was so brief, still enough to increase risk for cognitive decline. And then there's the organics, of course, the glyphosates and things like that. And then of course, the mycotoxins. So all of these things are critical to know.

And then things like your heart rate variability, again, easy to check. And if you're walking around here at 15 or 20 day in and day out, you have you're under a lot of stress, and you're not going to do as well in the long run. So the good news is just as you said, we can now measure and follow these things. I just checked my oxygenation on my Apple watch. 97% it's throughout. Cause I think we want to know specifically while we sleep, correct? And sleep apnea triples the risk of Alzheimer's disease. I can tell if you have sleep apnea because of early Alzheimer's disease. Really?

You get this parietal lobe Saturday, so decrease in the parietal lobe, one of the first areas that die in Alzheimer's disease. Don't you think, I think people are actually being diagnosed later in the course of the illness because of their phones. It used to be when I first started in practice, I get a patient referred to me for Alzheimer's disease because they lost their way home. And in the city they lived in for 30 years. Well, now nobody loses their way home because you can just tell your phone, take me home.

And maps will take them home. So I actually think our gadgets are getting us later diagnoses than we had before because people can sort of fudge their memory. This is such a good point. And you know that the people on the one hand, they are absolutely being diagnosed later because there are so many workarounds now. But interestingly, they're also being diagnosed younger. So that's a that's a scary combination. When I was training back in the 80s at UC San Francisco, we never saw people in their 50s with Alzheimer's disease.

This was a disease of late 60s, 70s, 80s. We see one of the most common things we see now is a 52-year-old person with Alzheimer's disease. And so, and in fact, that was reported with an epidemiological study about a year ago that they're seeing the same thing more and more young. But Daniel, you in fact, that's, that was reported with an epidemiological study about a year ago that they're seeing the same thing more and more young. But Daniel, you brought up something really interesting. If you don't mind, I want to ask you a key question here. So you brought up the biparietal look. And of course, on PET scans, you typically see it's temporal and

parietal. But what's really interesting. So here's my question for you. When we see people who have a largely biparietal, not so much temporal look, so not so, a non-amnestic presentation with things like apraxias and agnosias and PCA and things like that, executive dysfunction of the parietal type rather than the frontal type. These people typically turn out to have toxic exposure as opposed to a more inflammatory or metabolic syndrome. So do you see in your patients who have cognitive decline, do you see a group that is much more biparietal than temporoparietal? Yes. And I think of them as, you know, I have to wonder about sleep apnea. So that's the first I think about, but you also wonder if they've been dropped on their head, because traumatic brain injury is a major cause of dementia that very few people talk about, because they're not looking at functional scans they look at structural things that often don't show up for our listeners you guys need to translate this okay so bifurital just means on both sides so bilateral both sides of your parietal

of top back part of your brain that's involved with direct sense. Yes. And it's also involved in recognizing when you have a problem, especially the non side of the brain versus your temporal lobes underneath your temples and behind your eyes. And on the inside of your temporal lobes, that's what dies in Alzheimer's disease, is this very special part of the brain called the hippocampus. That is one of the very few parts of the brain that produce new baby cells every day. Hippocampus is Greek for seahorse. So you're actually making 700 new baby seahorses every day.

And if you're starving of oxygen, because you have sleuth apnea well you're murdering them or if you're smoking weed i'm like not a huge fan of all weed being smoked because it shrinks the abacampus great point and the way we tend to see them is the ones who have the temporal parietal come in with memory problems the ones that have the temporal parietal come in with memory problems. The ones that have the biparietal, as you said, kind of back here, without the temporal, don't have the memory problems. They have the problems with calculation, and they have the problem with planning. They have the problem with recognizing other people's faces. And they often are the earlier ones in their early 50s. So those are the sorts of things that make me look so that's very interesting that it really, you know, it

really makes you think about sleep apnea. That's a great point. So very interesting. Thank you. Well, and what the problem has been, is we can say what it is. So it's Alzheimer's, but we're not saying why it is. And it's why that got screwed up because everybody was saying it's beta amyloid plaque deposition and your work and the work of a lot of people who published in the Journal of Alzheimer's is that's complete nonsense. Because beta amyloid may actually be a protective deposition from mold exposure or infections.

And if you don't go after the why, you'll never fix the problem. So we have to go on to the next podcast. It's so interesting. We could talk all day. In fact, we've got two more to do. We are here with Dr. Dale Bredesen, author of the international bestselling book, The End of Alzheimer's, The End of Alzheimer's Program.

And the new book in August is The First Survivors of Alzheimer's. I love that title. It gives me goosebumps. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.