Dhru Purohit Show - Uncovering The Root Causes of Alzheimer’s and What You Can Do to Prevent It with Dr. Dale Bredesen

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi everyone, Drew Brode here today. We have a mini episode all on the topic of Alzheimer's and getting to the root of neurodegeneration. We have none other than one of our favorite guests on this topic, New York Times bestselling author, Researcher Extraordinaire, Dr. Dale Bredesen. And he's on the podcast today to talk to us about what actually truly drives neurodegeneration. Typically, we associate that with Alzheimer's, cognitive decline, and dementia. What are the top insults in the brain that contribute to Alzheimer's? Well, you're going to learn about that in today's episode.

Starting point is 00:00:34 Dr. Dale Bredison's also going to talk about red flags to pay attention to when it comes to cognitive decline. And lastly, he's going to talk about how you can catch cognitive decline early by taking some simple cognitive decline tests that he's made available. This is a great episode for anybody who wants to protect their brain from decline in the future and even potentially, You know, if you've not read Dr. Dale Bredison's latest book, it's about the first survivors of Alzheimer's. It gives us hope that just like cancer, everybody knows somebody who had cancer, but then got to the root of it or fixed it or solved it, whether it's through functional medicine or mainstream medicine is now a survivor.

Starting point is 00:01:14 Well, they're starting to see that in Alzheimer's. It's super early. And listen, this is a controversial area. Some people push back on Dale Bredison's work, but listen to him and make up your mind to see if some of the themes that he's saying. seen as his research could be beneficial things that you can incorporate into your own life. It's a fantastic listen. Stay tuned. Is it truly possible to recover from Alzheimer's? It's a loaded question. And some people might

Starting point is 00:01:43 even say it's a blasphemous question. Right. But you're the man to ask. I would agree with you. It's blasphemous. But absolutely, we've seen it again and again and again. As proof, For example, we just published our trial, proof of concept trial. In that trial, 84% of the people actually improve their scores. So we have unquestionable, objective evidence of improvement. And when you say you publish your trial, right, for those folks that are just new to you and are not familiar with your protocol program that you've designed, let's give a little bit of context around this.

Starting point is 00:02:20 What was that trial trying to look at? what answers came from it? Yeah, great point. So way back in 2011, we were looking at root cause, as you well know, root cause medicine is critical. And so we were looking at root causes of cognitive decline. And in 2011, we proposed the first comprehensive trial for people with MCI or Alzheimer's. And let me just digress for one moment to say this concept of MCI, mild cognitive impairment, has really hurt people and the field. When you say that someone has, mild cognitive impairment. That is like saying they have mildly metastatic cancer. It is a late stage of the process. Typically, they've had the underlying pathophysiology for 15 or 20 years

Starting point is 00:03:08 before they're getting a diagnosis of MCI. And then about each year, about 10% of those people will convert to full-on Alzheimer's, which is the end stage of really what is the Alzheimer's pathophysiology. And just to pause there for a second, if you could rename that, right, And come up with a different term, just to show people the severity and the weight that comes along with that, is there any thoughts of what you would want to call that? Absolutely. So there are four stages. You want asymptomatic, subjective cognitive impairment, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's. What they should be called is pre-Alzheimer's.

Starting point is 00:03:41 That's the asymptomatic period. Subjective is early stage Alzheimer's disease. What we call mild, mild cognitive impairment is advanced stage Alzheimer's disease. And what we currently call Alzheimer's disease is final stage Alzheimer's. So it shows you you actually have a tremendous amount of time. SCI itself lasts about 10 years on average. So the window is open. The problem is that people keep saying, wait till next year, your doctor will tell you,

Starting point is 00:04:14 oh, you got MCI, it's not that bad yet. No, if you understand that that is a relatively late stage of this process, then you really understand that you need to get in as a. early as possible. We'd like to see everybody who's 45 years of age or older getting on active prevention. We really could make this a rare disease if people would start earlier. People with SCI, which is really a second stage, virtually 100 percent of those people can get better. As you go on, just no difference in cancer. As you get later, later, later, it is more and more difficult to reverse the process. But we do see this in our trial. So 2011,

Starting point is 00:04:54 we were actually turned down because it was a multi-variable trial. And of course, it's a multivariable disease. So the idea of saying, well, you can only test one thing at a time really makes no physiological sense. And just to pause right there, just for those that are not maybe familiar with the process of research and everything, I think this is an important thing because you hear so many times. By the way, your new book is called The First Survivors of Alzheimer's, how patients recovered life and hope in their own words. And this builds on your previous books that were there all on the topic of Alzheimer's outlining

Starting point is 00:05:28 your protocol that you've put together. So an important thing that's there is that, you know, there have been over, I believe, 400 different clinical trials that have tried to get to the, to at least have a drug that makes even a small difference. Right. When it comes to Alzheimer's in cognitive decline. And largely, all of them have failed, including the most recent one that there's been some controversy about in the FDA. We'll come back to that. And the traditional model of medicine is

Starting point is 00:05:57 looking at, okay, what's the one thing that causes Alzheimer's? And then we're going to come up with the one drug that fixes Alzheimer's. And you're saying, no, that's not the case. Expand on that a little bit more. This episode is brought to you by Inside Tracker. I've experimented with every eating approach in the book. Raw foodist, yep, raw foodist, vegan, vegetarian, meat eater, you name it, I've tried it. And the truth is, at first, I felt pretty good on all of them, until I didn't. Through a bunch of trial and error, I found that following one specific eating style wasn't the answer for me.

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Starting point is 00:08:59 love your mattress. So we spent 30 years in the laboratory, published over 220 peer-reviewed papers, looking at what actually drives this process that we call neurodegeneration, starting with Alzheimer's, but looking at ALS and frontotemporal dementia and Louis body disease and all these diseases. this is the area of greatest biomedical therapeutic failure, as you know. And so when you actually look at that, what you see is there are contributions, because you can literally follow the molecular pathways through a molecule called APP itself, amyloid precursor protein, which is the thing that gives rise to the amyloid that we vilify in Alzheimer's disease.

Starting point is 00:09:41 Your body, though, is not trying to kill you. It's trying to protect itself. the amyloid is an antimicrobial peptide. It also binds specific toxins, such as copper and iron in too high concentrations. So this is a response, and so therefore, when you look at the complex physiology that underlies this cognitive decline, the idea of taking this, it would be a little bit like you have a car that has, you know, 17 things wrong with it, and you're just going to fill it up with gas and say, let's see if that works. The idea of throwing a single molecule at such a complex brain disease is ridiculously naive. One pharmaceutical intervention is not going to get to the root

Starting point is 00:10:30 issue of this thing that has so many different things going on. Absolutely. There are hormonal changes. There are nutritional changes, as you know. There are toxic exposures. You're often making the amyloid because you have specific pathogens in your brain, just as the pathologists have told us for years, when they look in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's, what do they find? They find bacteria like P. Gingervalis. They find spirochetes like T. Dentacola. They find various fungi. They find various viruses like herpes simplex or H.HV6.

Starting point is 00:11:10 All these things exist in the brain. The brain is protecting itself against these problems. And so our goal then is to identify for each person, what are the things that this person's brain is making this amyloid for? The idea of just removing the amyloid is like taking down the protection. And no surprise, you see some dire outcomes, some dire consequences from removing that without removing the root cause problem. So what you have to do is look at all these things. For each person, you're going to find a different profile, and then you need to address that profile with a personalized precision medicine or functional medicine type of protocol. When you do that, people get better.

Starting point is 00:11:58 And it's so striking to see. And so that's what the new book is about, seven people who had wonderful results who talk about their results and their own journeys to get better and talk about the protocols that they have. actually used. You know, a great analogy that I heard is everybody's fallen, scraped their knee or their elbow, and then what happens? Your body is intelligent, and a scab will end up being built. Right. And nobody would look at a scab and say, hey, what is this thing that's there? It wasn't there previously. Let's start peeling that off. And in fact, our approach right now in many aspects of health, specifically when it comes to cognitive decline in Alzheimer's is let's give a drug that starts to remove this scab off, which is the amyloid plaque that's there. So the entire focus is on removing

Starting point is 00:12:50 something that we see as being foreign that previously wasn't there, but we have to realize that the body has a deep sense of intelligence and many things it does, it does on purpose except for rare, rare, rare genetic diseases, which are less than, you know, a small few percentage points of the total diseases that people go through. So we have to ask a bigger question. And that bigger question is, why is the scab there in the first place and why does the body keep on cutting itself? So in that same analogy and parallel, before we jump into a couple of these stories, give us a couple of the main pillars. You've already mentioned them, but in a way that is translated here.

Starting point is 00:13:28 So everybody can see the different silos and the pillars that can add up to the cuts that end up happening on the brain. Let's just mention a few of them. So you talked about insulin resistance. and blood sugar. So that is often a main one that's talked about. So how is that related to Alzheimer's and our brain health? Yeah, it's a good point. And as you know, over 80 million Americans have insulin resistance. So it's an incredibly common problem. And so it is, it actually contributes in multiple ways. So if you break down the science, what you find is the thing that actually triggers this change. So APP, the amyloid precursor protein,

Starting point is 00:14:09 sits at the center of this and is essentially a master switch. So when things are good, much like the president of our country, when things are good, it sends out signals that say build, new interactions. It's a growth period. So your growth in support, and that's what allows you to make and keep memories. On the other hand, this is about neuroplasticity. On the other hand, that same master switch molecule, APP, which sits in your neurons, especially at synapses, and to a lesser extent, in non-neuronal cells.

Starting point is 00:14:44 This is sampling the environment. And when things are bad, it's literally being cleaved, and it's now sending out a different set of signals that say pullback. And by the way, the analogy is direct to what happened with the pandemic. So we had an insult, in that case, SARS-CoV-2. We were told, okay, we got a shelter in place. We got a social distance. So things pulled out. We went into a protective mode.

Starting point is 00:15:13 And what happened? We ended up with a recession. The exact same thing is happening in your brain. When you have these various insults, then what happens is you change the signaling from one of growth and maintenance, keeping and making memories, to one of protection. You're now in a protective downsizing. mode. You are losing synapses. Your brain is saying, I'm under assault. I can survive by being less of a brain. I'm going to be a smaller brain. I'm going to have fewer synapses. I'm not going to

Starting point is 00:15:46 be able to have the same degree of neuroplasticity, but I will be able to survive. And so it's now making the amyloid that is killing, by the way, the bacteria and things like that. This was shown a number of years ago by professors Robert Moyer and Rudy Tansy from Harvard. You look at the, so you look at this as a mode. Now, just as you said, as long as you keep the insult, you keep making that scab over and over, you keep having the insults, you're going to downsize. So the insults come in four major groups, and you can literally trace the tracks through the molecular pathways of APP. So, number one, anything with inflammation. So if you trigger NF-CAPA-B, you are going to increase. NF-CAPA-B, of course, enters the nucleus, turns on hundreds of genes, and two of the ones that it turns on are the

Starting point is 00:16:38 ones that make the A-Beta, the beta secretase and the gamma-secretase, which cut the APP to make more amyloid. It's saying, ouch, you know, I'm seeing inflammation, I'm going to deal with these pathogens. So that's anything, inflammation, and that can be metabolic syndrome, it can be poor dentition, it can be inflammation from chronic sinusitis. It can be any sort of exposure to different pathogens, leaky gut, all of the above. So that's the first one. The second one that's huge is toxicity. Because what you're saying is that all that inflammation in the body, wherever it's starting, and we've done a bunch of episodes on dental health and how that's related to body inflammation. All that inflammation will ultimately make its way. It's not just in the body.

Starting point is 00:17:22 What you do to the body, you do to the brain. Exactly. And I think one of the most important understandings is that the amyloid itself is part of the innate immune system. So when we're we talk about inflammation, we talk about things like NFCAPA B and cytokines and things like that, the amyloid is itself part of that response. So as long as you've got that ongoing inflammation, you're going to be making that amyloid. So just as people died from cytokine storm with COVID-19, people are dying from cytokine drizzle with Alzheimer's disease. It is creating over the years this cytokine drizzle. It's a slower process. It's a slower process. It's a It's a more chronic process, but it's the same idea.

Starting point is 00:18:07 And so, yes, we've got to balance that. We've got to remove the source of that. We've got to first identify the source. What is this? Is this P. Gingervalis from your dentition? Is this Lyme disease? You know, is this leaky gut? Is this chronic sinusitis?

Starting point is 00:18:22 Is this mold? Whatever it is, we've got to identify it. We've got to remove it. That's the key. And then, but absolutely, just as people looked at using things like dexamethosone with COVID 19, you have to think about how can we also quiet down. So we like to use resolvance, for example. Very helpful.

Starting point is 00:18:41 But again, without removing the cause of it, you're going to be in trouble down the road. So you've got to look at both, what's causing it, and then how to deal with what's being produced. So that's the first group. The second group, toxins. And they come in three different subgroups, basically. Number one, anything that is an inorganic, things like mercury and things like air pollution, People who've been in the California fires. It's a big issue, just being exposed to that smoke.

Starting point is 00:19:07 The people who are exposed to the World Trade Center, by the way, 14% of them developed cognitive decline by 15 years after that event. So it's a huge player in giving you increased risk for cognitive decline. Incredible. Very important. And then second group is the organics. So things like glyphosate and toluene and benzene and formaldehyde and things like that. Acraline, exposure to. fumes from cars and things like that as well. Scented candles and things that are all over the place,

Starting point is 00:19:38 the fragrances that are there. Scary. Yeah, exactly. It's very scary. We often don't even know the full extent, the damage that those scents do, even though it feels like we want to be surrounded by pleasurable sense. You know, they're wreaking havoc on our body sometimes. Please be careful. Yeah, over time. And then the third group is the biotoxins. So things like mycotoxins, trichotoxin, gliotoxin, alpha toxin, things like that, aphloxin and things like okra toxin A, all of those can contribute. And the good news is, you know,

Starting point is 00:20:09 many molds aren't making these toxins, but the kind of the classic ones, the stachybatross and penicillium, aspergillus, ketomium, walemia, those are the big five to be concerned about. So those are the, so it's inflammation toxins. And then the other two are things that if you don't have enough of them,

Starting point is 00:20:27 they're supportive things for your brain. And the first is energetics. So we have an equation in the denominator in the numerator are the toxins and the inflammogens in the denominator, energetics and trophic support. So for energetics, the big four things there, cerebral blood flow, oxygenation. So people who have sleep apnea, huge problem, huge increase in risk. Dropping your oxygenation is huge. And, of course, you can check it easily on your, you can check it on an iPhone,

Starting point is 00:20:56 or you can check it on a watch, or you can check it many different ways to check your oxygenation, getting an oxymeter and look at night, for example. The third part there is mitochondrial function that you guys, of course, talk so elegantly about frequently. And then the fourth one is the actual burnable combustible substrate, which in this case ketones. So as Stephen Kinane taught us all a number of years ago, you've got a gap there. When you have Alzheimer's disease, you've got poor glucose utilization. That is the signature, the hallmark on a pet scan, for Alzheimer's disease and even for 10 years before a diagnosis is temporal and parietal reduced glucose utilization. Well, the good news is you can bridge that gap with ketones. So with the

Starting point is 00:21:42 combination, and if you can develop metabolic flexibility so that you can now burn both the fats and the glucose, you're in the best shape. So we want to do both. And so you can see when someone has insulin resistance, they are causing their own cognitive decline by multiple. mechanisms. They're creating inflammation because of the non-enzymatic glycation of hundreds of proteins. They're also causing a resistance to so that you now have reduced trophic support from insulin. When we would grow brain cells in a dish, which we did for 30 years in the lab, you'd always have to include some insulin there because you needed that to keep the cells alive. It is a very important neurotrophic activity. Things like nerve growth,

Starting point is 00:22:28 brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and insulin are all critical for keeping neurons alive. So you're having this second mechanism as well. You're also having a metabolic component there. You're not only have the insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance loss, but you're having the trophic problems also. You have a metabolic problem, a trophic problem, an inflammatory problem. you're really ticking most of the boxes to give yourself cognitive decline when you have insulin resistance. And then I should say the fourth piece of this, then the third beast being the low energetics, the fourth part of this then is trophic support. And those come in three groups. So it is growth factors, as I just mentioned, things like insulin and things like NGF and BDNF. But secondly, it is

Starting point is 00:23:17 hormones. So this is why estradiol in the past was noted to be a critical support. And I suddenly loss of estradiol, as was shown by Mayo Clinic group years ago, if you have a sudden loss of estradiol at the age of 40 or younger, and you don't get HRT, then you are doubling your risk for Alzheimer's. Even though the Alzheimer's isn't coming until the future, you are increasing your risk starting at that time. And then the third of those three is nutrition. And so getting appropriate vitamin D and appropriate omega-3s and all these things, huge. So you look at the those groups, and you can add to that stress, which is another piece of this, it's really a part of the trophic and metabolic piece because of its effect on things like cortisol, DHA, and

Starting point is 00:24:04 Pregninoleone, and things like that. But those are the big groups. If you can optimize those four main groups, you are going to do a tremendous amount with preventing and reversing cognitive decline. And on the other hand, simply throwing a single drug at what you can see as quite a complex problem really doesn't make any sense. Now, with many of these stories, you talk about the quantifiable improvements in addition to the stories of reconnecting with family, recognizing faces again, remembering important business details and life details, being able to function and operate as a normal human being. Now, on a study level with the proof of concept study that you did, what were some of the key markers that you were looking at to show improvement that you could share here from a group level? Great point because, of course, proving this is the critical piece. People will say, well, you know, I'm skeptical. So this person seems they say that they feel better. What does that mean? So we looked at MOCA scores, so Montreal Cognitive Assessment. We looked at CNS Vital Science scores, which is an online assessment, very sensitive, more sensitive than MOCA. So we have a bigger, the MOCA is better at a, when you have a, a more enhanced degree of MCI or early all. Alzheimer's disease, whereas the CNS Vital Signs are very good for people who have even mild

Starting point is 00:25:26 changes. We also looked at MRI volumetrics, so you could look at things like total gray matter volume, total hippocampal volume. We also looked at what's called AQC, which is a change scale, where you're now getting the partners to say, you know, have you noticed anymore? Because there are classic examples of testing drugs where, yes, you've got a tiny, tiny change that you can measure, but the partners can tell nothing. They can't tell who's on a placebo and who's on the drug.

Starting point is 00:25:56 So that way it gives you a compliment. We're looking at brain volumes. We're looking at subjective changes as monitored by the partners. We're looking at objective changes with cognitive scores from MOCA and cognitive scores from CNS Vital Science. And what we saw was 76% of the people had improved. And this is important to note. It's not just a slowing of decline with the drug.

Starting point is 00:26:22 They're not getting people better. They're simply slowing in one trial only, slowing the decline. In another trial, no slowing of decline. In one trial, there was a 22% slowing of decline. In our trial, people actually got better, so they improved their scores, 76% MoCA improvements, 84% CNS Vital Signs improvements, then 84% of the AQ change scale improvement. And by the way, their hippocampal volumes improved and their gray matter volumes improved. Their gray matter volumes actually went up. So we compare with normal aging. There is a slight reduction in gray matter and hippocampal volumes.

Starting point is 00:27:05 And then there is a greater reduction if you have MCI or Alzheimer's. These people not only beat the MCI in Alzheimer's, they actually beat normal aging. So they did better on their volumetrics than people that have. had no complaints that were aging. And these are people with MCI or Alzheimer's who are now being treated. Now, let me hasten to add, for people who had severe Alzheimer's, they were not included. We did essentially a very similar study to what was done with adikinamab. These were people with MCI and early Alzheimer's. So some of them did have true Alzheimer's, but it was a relatively earlier stage. We didn't have people with mocha scores of zero. Now, for the future, we're interested

Starting point is 00:27:48 in doing a trial of severe Alzheimer's patients because we have anecdotes of improvement of those. But no question, the farther along, the harder it is to get improvements, the more that you have to do. Just like every single disease that's out there, as you mentioned earlier, cancer, right? The sooner that we get into it, the sooner that we can start to make improvements, because there's some fundamental change, at least with the technology that we have right now, that we cannot repair certain level of damage that's been done to the brain or the body. And that's the question. Can we now improve it? You know, what if we add stem cells for some people? What if we have, you know, intranasal trophic factors? There's no question. Someone in the future will come up with some way, even in very late stages, to turn things around. So we always ask ourselves, what will that person from the future do that we didn't think of? So we want to pull out all the stops. This is a, as you know, when someone comes in with cognitive decline, either you're going to help them or they will.

Starting point is 00:28:47 die. And so we want to pull out all the stops to say, what can we do to make people better? It's so important. And in the future, when they do solve it, regardless of what approach that they have, any kind of innovative technologies, it's still going to be multifaceted. However it works, whatever the way it works, it's still going to be multifaceted. Still, if we develop nanobots that can go inside of the body as like little builders and engineers, they're not just going to be removing amyloid plaque. They're going to be working on all different functions and systems inside the body. It's the difference between playing tick-tac-toe and somebody who's like a master, you know, grandmaster in chess.

Starting point is 00:29:30 Exactly. Exactly right. And, you know, this brings up the issue of wearables. This is going to be, as you know, this is already changing the way people think about their metabolic status and their cardiovascular status. What's happening now is because of the way our medical system has been set up. It is a sick care. As Mark has pointed out many times, as Dr. Hyman has said to us, you know, we're in a sick care system. We need to now be looking at people much earlier on. So if we could simply capture the earliest changes, we could make it so that all of these chronic illnesses are optional. And so all the wearables looking at heart rate variability, looking at ketone levels, looking at continuous glucose monitoring, looking at telomere length,

Starting point is 00:30:17 looking at oxymetry at night. You can now begin to see how someone is doing, and you can pick up things long before they would ever have any clinical and subjective complaints. That is the trick to ridding ourselves of these complex chronic illnesses, because the problem has always been they don't give you symptoms until they're mostly over. You don't get the symptoms of chronic renal failure until your glomerular filtration rate is about 25 or so. You've got about 25% of normal kidney function. If someone could pick it up and say,

Starting point is 00:30:54 ah, Drew, you're at 90%. Hey, something you better check in to see what's going on. Oh, great. They've just saved your life. So they've saved you some dialysis at least. So this is the way. I think these wearables are actually going to be very helpful for all of us going forward.

Starting point is 00:31:08 And just pick a couple of them. Let's even talk about like, you know, continuous glucose monitoring or, you know, any, any one of these that you want to pick up. If we're talking about pre, pre, pre, pre, pre, Alzheimer's, right? Because I'm turning 40 next year. There you go. And I'm interested in this, even though, and by the way, there were people, as we mentioned, Debra, that in her 40s started noticing early signs that was there.

Starting point is 00:31:32 So this is not just an Alzheimer's disease, quote unquote. This is for people at every age that are there. If we're looking at this category of pre, pre, pre, most people go to their doctor and again, well-intentioned, you have 10 minutes, your physical, annual, everything like that. They're like, look, nothing is too bad. Everything is actually good, normal. It's a normal reference ranges.

Starting point is 00:31:55 I'm going to send you off. Just keep on doing what you're doing. But then people feel like, I don't actually feel well. I'm putting on weight. I'm not sleeping as well. So what are some examples in some of the things that you mentioned? because people are always interested, you know, at the full level of somebody's going to go down the pathway and has early cognitive decline or has a history of in their family, they really need to be working with a physician to personalize that, right? That you really do need somebody to guide you through and that's what you've built and we'll talk a little bit more about that.

Starting point is 00:32:22 But for the folks that are listening today that are looking for things that they can do themselves, what would be in that category of that pre-pre-Alzheimer's numbers, metrics, variables, whatever, that they should be paying attention to. Great point. You know, that's part of the problem that we physicians were taught end-stage medicine. We were taught to feel for lymph nodes that indicated metastatic cancer. Well, we'd like to pick it up long before that. And so that's why, you know, great things like colonoscopy, very, very helpful, picking things up early and pap smears and things like that. So picking things up early critical. And so one of the key points let me make, brain fog, with COVID.

Starting point is 00:33:03 at 19, what are we hearing again and again and again? Brain fog. That tells you something is not quite right. And you see it with chemical exposures. And you see it with insulin resistance. You see it with horrible food intake. You see it with poor sleep, with high stress. These are all red flags to tell you when you're getting that brain fog. And so, yes, following these physiological parameters, really huge. And I, yeah, absolutely. CGM. I think that's fantastic. I also really like things like whether you like URA ring, whether you like Apple Watch. They look at slightly different things. The Apple Watch looks at things like oxymetry, nocturnal oxymetry, which is very, very helpful. Orrha Ring a little better for sleep. And again, I mean, I'm agnostic. Whatever

Starting point is 00:33:55 works, whatever is going to help. Looking at your sleep profile, this thing called Dream 2 that some people like to use is another one. You know, looking at heart rate variability. And it just shows you how much just appropriate breathing for a few minutes each day, what that can do for your heart rate variability, what can really do for your vagal tone and for improving your stress levels. Of course, simple things, blood pressure monitors. Everyone should know where they stand with these sorts of things.

Starting point is 00:34:28 And then looking at your gut microbiome. another critical piece. Through literally doing things that you can do yourself, you can get a tremendous look at your own health and really signal yourself long before you ever begin to have that brain fog that's heading, ultimately in the long run, for the cognitive decline that is killing about 15% of Americans right now, an incredibly common problem. And just looking at Alzheimer's, as Professor Christine Yaffe has published a few years ago, it is now the third. third leading cause of death in this country. And for perspective, I should say, it will kill nearly a hundred times as many of the currently living Americans as COVID-19 has. COVID-19, as you know,

Starting point is 00:35:13 is now over 600,000. Alzheimer's will kill about 45 million of the currently living Americans. There are about 6 million who already have a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. So it's an incredibly common problem. And again, it's just an end stage to the big picture of cognitive decline. So I think a number of these wearables really, really helpful, really interesting. Of course, you can also look at your vascular elasticity. Literally kind of gives you an idea of your youthfulness. And as you know, Dr. Cara Fitzgerald recently just did a very nice study where she showed reversal of aging, where you can really take years off people's lives when you're looking at a methylation, a methylome, basically. And then, again, doing a functional medicine type of

Starting point is 00:36:02 protocol that she set up and looking at a reversal in aging. And so we're now going to be doing that same thing. And we're working with Kara on this next phase to be able to look not only at improvements in cognition, but improvements in aging itself. That's powerful. And, you know, like a lot of things, it can be very intimidating in any category of life. If you have ignored your finances for a long period of time and then you're trying to prepare for retirement, it can feel overwhelming. So it's helpful to get education to feel inspired, to read stories of hope. And the same thing goes in health. If somebody's listening here and it's like these feel like so many different aspects, it's a big part of why you've built the network and sort of infrastructure

Starting point is 00:36:46 that you have. So let's talk about that. Let's say somebody's listening here and it's like, you know what? I want to get some handholding down. the I want to take the next step and I want to get a little bit more handholding. I think, you know, I recommend anybody, you know, pick up the book, any one of the three books, but especially this one, the first survivors of Alzheimer's, so that you can feel hopeful. If there's not hope, if you don't see a sense of, you know, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I can feel excited and know that this happened for other people and it's possible for me. It's going to feel very heavy if you continue down the journey.

Starting point is 00:37:22 But now let's say they want to continue down the journey. What of your different resources are out there that they should go to next to get some more handholding and find the right people to build and be part of their team? It's a great point. And no question, having a team that includes often a health coach and or a nutritionist and or physical therapists can be very, very helpful. And again, a physician who can get to the root cause of the illness is huge. So you can either do this, as you mentioned, the books. I'm also looking at just Dr.bredison.com, and you can look at specifics, and then that will link you. We've been working with Apollo Health. This is a group that is very good with software, and so the future is in algorithmic medicine, is in larger data sets.

Starting point is 00:38:11 That's what we absolutely need to get best outcomes. And so we have an approach where we can take specific algorithms and apply them. And again, as we get more and more sophisticated, we'll be able to look more and more carefully at all these different issues. Do you have minor changes in your gut microbiome that artificial intelligence will tell you turn out to be critical? You know, that's the future of medicine to use these larger data sets. You know, again, we've practiced medicine over the centuries in a way that is very simplistic compared to the organisms that we're trying to help. And so we need to get more and more sophisticated at what we look at and how we deal with it, the algorithms that we use to get best outcomes.

Starting point is 00:38:58 So you're going to continue to build out Apollo Health and there'll be more available. But on the most simplistic level, you know, there's people listening all over North America and the world right now. So to find at least one sort of maybe somebody who could be your co-CEO for your health, a physician that can kind of help you build out and maybe find, they can still find that on Apollo Health and work with you. guys over there to really figure out who's in their area that they could potentially engage with. Absolutely. So you can get that from Apollo Health. The other thing to do is you can go to

Starting point is 00:39:29 mycognoscopy.com to look at what are the things that I need to check now. Again, we really suggest that everyone who turns 45 or is older than 45, please get evaluated, get on an appropriate prevention protocol so that we can reduce the global burden of dementia. And if you've begun to have symptoms, okay, please, you know, please get these treated as early as possible. It's the waiting that's really hurt people, this idea of waiting later and later and later, and your doctor will tell you, well, yeah, you might as well wait because there's nothing that can be done anyway, or you might as well not check your genetics because there's nothing you can do about it anyway. As you said earlier, the arsenal is now huge.

Starting point is 00:40:14 We've been told in the past there is no arsenal for cognitive decline, and the reality, it's just, just the opposite of that. There is a tremendous and growing arsenal that we can all use for prevention and reversal of cognitive decline. It reminds me, I think I might even mention this last in my interviewed you. I don't remember. But in the 50s, it was considered, you know, standard of care to tell doctors that it was up to them of whether or not they wanted to communicate to their patients that they had cancer. Because they often told them, don't tell your patient. You know, it's recommended, you know, you make the decision doctor, but don't tell your patient that they have cancer because they could be at increased rate of suicide or they'd be, you know, go into

Starting point is 00:40:55 depression and then their quality of life would really go down. But where was that coming from? That was coming from a standpoint of, you know, there's really not much that we could do for these individuals. And in a similar way, not in the same exact way, but that's kind of what's happening right now a little bit with Alzheimer's. Of course, no doctor's not going to tell you, but they're going to say, really, you're not able to do a lot. And here you are. saying no, there's hope and we can do a lot, but it has to be personalized and it has to get at the root if we're going to find that hope.

Dhru Purohit Show - Uncovering The Root Causes of Alzheimer’s and What You Can Do to Prevent It with Dr. Dale Bredesen

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