Primary Topic
This episode explores how lifestyle changes and interventions can significantly impact the prevention and management of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and dementia.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- Exercise and diet are powerful tools for improving brain health and function.
- Simple daily habits can protect the brain and reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases.
- Advanced genetic and lifestyle factors are modifiable through targeted interventions.
- Inflammation is a central pathway affecting neurodegenerative diseases, which can be managed through lifestyle.
- Groundbreaking studies like the FINGER study provide evidence that lifestyle interventions can improve cognitive function.
Episode Chapters
1: Introduction and Overview
Dr. Hyman introduces the episode's theme and the importance of brain health. Dr. Hyman: "Millions of Americans are affected by neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia, but there are simple steps we can take to protect our brains."
2: The Power of Exercise
Discussion on how physical activity supports brain health and neuroplasticity. Dr. Richard Isaacson: "Exercise has emerged with real biological evidence that it can prevent and improve brain function and brain health."
3: Dietary Impact
Exploration of dietary influences on brain health, including the role of specific diets like the ketogenic diet. Dr. Jay Lombard: "Diet and supplements are looking at things that actually help create health."
4: Genetic and Environmental Influences
Analysis of genetic factors like the ApoE4 gene and their interaction with lifestyle choices. Dr. Marwan Sabah: "We can modify these genes' expression, which ones get turned on and off, and how they work."
5: Practical Advice and Conclusions
Summarization of actionable advice based on the discussed research and studies. Dr. Hyman: "What you've just said is pretty radical. By eating better, exercising, optimizing your health, we literally can slow and even start to reverse the disease."
Actionable Advice
- Incorporate regular physical activity tailored to individual health needs.
- Adopt a brain-healthy diet low in sugar and high in anti-inflammatory foods.
- Manage stress and optimize sleep for better brain health.
- Consider genetic testing to understand personal risk factors and tailor prevention strategies accordingly.
- Stay informed about the latest research and incorporate new findings into daily health practices.
About This Episode
Lifestyle and dietary factors are widely accepted as key drivers of disease among cardiologists, oncologists, and endocrinologists, however the impact of diet and lifestyle on our brain health still remains largely on the margins. And, while there are certainly other factors, creating healthy daily habits can make a significant difference.
In this episode, Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Marwan Sabbagh, Dr. Richard Isaacson, and Dr. Jay Lombard about the role of genetics in brain disorders, lifestyle habits you can start right now to reduce your risk or reverse symptoms, and why we need to look at bacteria as a cause of neurodegenerative disease.
People
Dr. Hyman, Dr. Marwan Sabah, Dr. Richard Isaacson, Dr. Jay Lombard
Companies
Leave blank if none.
Books
Leave blank if none.
Guest Name(s):
Dr. Marwan Sabah, Dr. Richard Isaacson, Dr. Jay Lombard
Content Warnings:
None
Transcript
Speaker A
Coming up on this episode of the. Doctor's pharmacy, exercise has really emerged as one of the areas that has grown with real biological evidence that it can prevent and improve brain function and brain health. Before we get into today's episode, I'd like to take a minute to remind you some exciting news. My new cookbook, the Young Forever Cookbook, will be released on Tuesday, June 4 nationwide. In my new cookbook, the Cooking Companion to my book, Young Forever, you'll find over 100 mouth watering, anti inflammatory recipes that are going to help you live a longer, healthier life.
You can pre order the young Forever cookbook at young forevercookbook.com dot. Just click on the pre order button at the top right. I'm so excited to share these recipes. With you and so much more. And again, the young Forever cookbook comes out on Tuesday, June 4.
Pre order yours today. As a functional medicine professional, I'm always on the lookout for innovative solutions to improve patient care. And that's why I'm excited to introduce you to Roopa Health, an easy to use lab ordering platform that that will. Make your life so easy. With Roopa Health, you gain access to over 3000 tests from more than 35 leading lab companies all in one convenient location.
That means no more time consuming paperwork or administrative nightmares, just a simple, efficient lab ordering process that I know you'll love. And the best part is completely free. That's right, there are no hidden fees or complicated billing systems, just one invoice paid online and up front. So why wait? Sign up free@rupahealth.com and take control of your lab ordering process today.
That's rupahealth.com dot. You know that my goal is to live, to be 120 and to thrive while doing it. And I'm always looking for tools and strategies to help me get there. I want to share with you one of the tools that I found and love. It's a nutritional supplement called ag one.
Ag one supports your body's universal needs like nutrient replenishment, gut optimization, stress management, and immune support. By giving your body nutrients it can easily absorb and utilize, ag one supports your daily performance and elevates your baseline health. I drink ag one every day and ever since I started, I've consistently felt better and had more energy throughout the I just add one scoop to my water in the morning and I feel the effects all day long. If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with ag one. We have an exciting new offer for my listeners.
Right now. Ag one is offering my audience a full year supply of their vitamin D three, k two liquid formula free with your first purchase. They're also going to give you five free travel packs as well. Just go to drinkag one.com hymen to get your free supply for a year of vitamin D three and k two and five free travel packs with your first purchase. Again, that's drinkagone.com dot.
Millions of Americans are affected by neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, dementia, ALs and Parkinson's, and more. But the good news is that there's some simple steps that we can take every single day to protect our brains and reduce the risk for, and even reverse the symptoms of cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases. Like in today's episode, we feature three different conversations from the doctor's pharmacy about why it's so important to take care of our brains when we're young and what to do if we're experiencing a brain condition. I speak with Doctor Marwan Sabah about the role of ApoE four gene. He was the head of the memories.
Speaker D
Clinic at Cleveland Clinic. I also speak with doctor Richard Isaacson, one of the pioneers in understanding how to reverse Alzheimer's disease with lifestyle modifications. It's quite amazing. And with doctor Jay Lombard about bacteria as the cause of neurodegenerative disease. So let's dive in.
Speaker B
We're now seeing now a big push to move the calculus beyond the time of symptoms to much earlier and try to find people and identify people at risk along the way. But most of that research has been focused on drug interventions to prevent or prevent, delay or forestall the onset of symptoms. But along the way, of course, if I'm going to my seventies and I know my disease started in my fifties or forties, we can change beyond drugs. We can change to, say, lifestyle interventions have benefits. And there's now a whole new area of research.
Exercise has really emerged as one of the areas that has grown with real biological evidence that it can prevent and improve brain function and brain health. And beyond that, we're seeing now people are looking at things like diet and supplements and other ways to manage the disease. And so I think this is an area as just relatively new, but very exciting. Yeah, I mean, there was a recent study called the finger study. The finger study is one of the ones which I talked about in the book.
Speaker D
Yeah, I know. And this study was done in Europe, and it was a very large study where they did an intervention with diet and exercise and stress and cogs dressing. Yeah. Addressing cardiovascular risk factors. And tell us about the study.
What do they find? Yeah. So this study is done at the Karolinski Institute, the geriatrician, her name is Mia Kivapel, to a really, really sharp, very thoughtful physician, scientists. And she said, we're going to create a multimodal intervention, including diet changes, managing health conditions, improving exercise, improving all their parameters. And one group was randomized to the intervention and one group was randomized to just kind of passive intervention and in an objective way followed for over two years with aggressive intervention.
Speaker B
The treated group did much, much better over the two years. Not only did they not get declined, they actually got better. Wow. And these are people not young. They were starting in their late sixties into their seventies.
So these aren't people in the middle of life. They're kind of in the senior, running into the senior age, and they actually got better. And this has been published in the journal Lancet. So it's a very respected, peer reviewed scientific journal. Well, this is really remarkable.
Speaker D
I just want to pause here because what you just said is pretty radical. Now, like I said, we spent billions of dollars on hundreds of studies and none of them showed this. We can't slow. That's great. Or reverse it.
Now you're saying just by eating better, exercising, optimizing your health, we literally can slow and even start to reverse the disease. That is correct. In fact, the US is taking the finger study. And in 2019, 2020, there will be the US version of it called the pointer study, which is being rolled out in about six sites in the United States this year. And the government has to pay for it because there's no drug involved.
Speaker B
Well, this is, to be very clear, the point of study, so far as I know, is being funded by the Alzheimer's association. I don't know if there will be federal dollars behind it, but the fundamental issue. But it's not a drug company. It is not a drug company. But the fundamental issue is we want to answer an important question.
Do these things objectively work the signal the way the evidence suggests? The answer is yes. And so having more evidence, because I have to tell you, you and I are both physicians, part of our day job is taking care of people with disease. Right. So here we are saying, let's step back from that.
Let's say instead of treating disease, let's treat health. Yeah. And did you take the course in medical school called creating health? I did not. I didn't either.
I did not take that course. Yeah, we didn't learn that. We did not. But, you know, but the advantage of that is that it's not prescriptive, then you can health recommendations that come up from consensus panels, and then it can have effect change at a larger level. This is actually easier to roll out if we can prove there's a signal than it is by just writing a prescription.
Speaker D
It's unbelievable. Yeah. I think, you know, what you said is really remarkable, that we need to focus on how do we create health, rather than just treat disease or symptoms or pathways or some pathology. And that's essentially what functional medicine is. It's asking the question, how do you create a healthy human being?
What are the factors that knock you off that path, and what are the things that actually help create health? And those studies, the finger study and the pointer study, are looking at those factors. And there are more, right? There are more. And I think that's the exciting thing, is that I think, you know, I have to tell you, I've been involved in all these clinical trials.
Speaker B
Every time there's a failure, it breaks everybody's heart. There is no ego involved. It's not like, ha ha, I told you so, because I will say to you, whether the drugs work or not, I'm going to clinic tomorrow or the next day, and I still got to look these people in the eye and say, something good is coming. We just kind of hope that it's coming soon. And so I say this to you, because if I can see a path forward, whether it's a drug, a device, a lifestyle intervention, any way forward, to help my patients either prevent, postpone, or delay.
Speaker D
Well, let's talk about the disease a little more in a medical way, because the understanding was from my training was that the brain seemed to be disconnected from the rest of the body. We learned about this barrier called the blood brain barrier, where nothing except some nutrients got in, and it was like this thing that disconnected our head from the rest of us. Turns out that our body is one system, and then our brains are connected to everything else that's happening in our gut. Microbiome, in infections, what we eat, everything is actually influencing our brain function. So can you share a little bit about how this understanding has changed the way we think about the brain and how some of these factors that are driving inflammation are actually causing this disease?
Because it's a disease of brain inflammation. It is. So the kind of the conventional wisdom that we're trying to look at is that inflammation is a response to an injury, or is it the injury itself? At the end of the day, a lot of people think that there's an amyloid triggered event, and then the inflammatory events occur because of the production of the amyloid. An amyloid is sticky, gooey stuff that gums up your brain.
Speaker B
That is correct and importantly. But we used to think, as you said, there was north of the neck and south of the neck, and that everything in the Alzheimer's was north of the neck and nothing south of the neck was related to it. Yeah. When, in fact, now we know that things like gut microbiome can alter your immune system. And having a healthy microbiome can keep you healthy and by the innate.
And it can boost your innate immunity, which might reduce inflammation across the body, including the brain. Yeah. And exercise helps reduce inflammation and bdnf. So the exercise. I have to tell you, I hated running, but I've taken up running because of BDNF.
Speaker D
So what is that? That's brain derived neurotrophic factor because of. It's like miracle growth for the brain. Miracle growth for the brain. And the funny part about it is almost, neuroscientists are runners.
Speaker B
They don't do anything but run. Okay. They have to have something to it. It's the fastest way to raise your. Bdnf levels, which is basically this growth factor that connects your brain cells together.
Speaker D
So it calls neuroplasticity, which increases connections and helps neurogenesis, which is the development of new brain cells. That is correct. So we never thought that was possible. We never thought it was possible. They said, once you're born with your neurons, you're going to get it.
Speaker B
But we now know that the brain's making neurons throughout their life. Yeah. I mean, I read a study where they studied terminal cancer patients, and they gave them this dye that only goes to dividing brain cells, and they found even at the point of death, they're making new brain cells. That's correct. We did a.
When I was in Sun City, Arizona, at the Banner Sun Health Research Institute, we had a brain and body donation program, and we had scientists that could take brains of patients who had just expired and culture out, bring out stem cells that were still left alive in dead brain. That's unbelievable. So, pretty cool stuff. So these things like diet and exercise and optimizing your gut microbiome and stress reduction, they all, in a sense, work by regulating this inflammatory process. That's correct.
That is correct. The inflammation, of course, is the unifying common pathway that we can manage. And, you know, the end of the day, that's what we want to do as well. The studies taking Advil never really worked. They tried it.
Well, Cox inhibitors have not worked. So then the questions are, scientifically, is it that pathway of inflammation? People are now looking at different pathways of inflammation, you know, now looking at tnf alpha, which is two necrosis alpha. They're looking at the fact that tnf alpha might trigger enzymes related to Alzheimer's called base. So we think that there's a links that inflammation is not just a broad category, but there are specific segments that seem to work and others that we've tried.
Like you said, we tried anti inflammatories for years to treat. To treat or prevent Alzheimer's. Didn't work worth it. Right. Well, that sort of goes back to the thinking in functional medicine, which is what's causing it in the first place.
Speaker D
Right. So if you're standing on a tack, it takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better, pull the tack out. So it's not necessarily the best logic, but it's something that we have to sort of begin to wonder about. I'm talking to one of your colleagues, Rudy Tanzi from Harvard, who said to me that they've done studies of patients who had brains full of this amyloid, but they had the gene somehow that didn't let them create inflammation, and they were cognitively intact. They didn't have dementia.
Speaker B
Right. And that's the amazing thing, is that you can go to your grave with a brain full of amyloid and not develop dementia. And we want to study those people because there's something that's protecting them against the development of symptoms. And, of course, they may have just less inflammation, as you commented. Rudy Tanzu would be the guy to figure that out.
Speaker A
Yeah. And he talked about the microbiome of the brain. I don't think they're still trying to figure it out, but they're finding microbes in the brain. We thought it was sterile up there, but turns out it may not be. It may not be.
Speaker B
And there's a new one that you probably just hearing about. There's a company out of the bay area that found there's an oral bacteria called P. Gingivalis, which creates a protein called gingipaine, which may be a neurotoxin and neurotrigger of neuroinflammation. And so they're looking at a drugs to stop that. Maybe brushing your teeth, flossing, and getting them clean is a good idea.
Not just good for the heart, it's good for the brain as well. That's right. I mean, people don't probably know that, but one of the biggest triggers for heart disease is gum. Disease, right? That's correct.
Speaker D
So let's talk about the genetics here for a minute. So, you know, most people think you get your genes, they're fixed, your fate is sealed. There's nothing you can do. It's not actually how genes work. You can modify these genes expression, which ones get turned on and off, and how they work.
And I remember had this patient years ago who was a 90 year old woman. She was a dentist. She had apoe four, meaning no way. She had two of the worst genes you could have that are triggers or maybe predisposing to Alzheimer's. And she was 90 years old.
She was still working, and she was completely cognitively intact, and she was a health nut her whole life. She ate a perfect diet, she exercised, she never smoked, she never drank, took her vitamins. I mean, it was remarkable to see that. And this is what you talk about in this book with this woman, Jamie. She came to you because she had a family history of Alzheimer's, and you checked her genes, and she had that dreaded apoe four gene, which many people are afraid to test because they feel like it's just a why bother?
So you talk about why bother? Right? Tell us, why bother? So I'll answer the why bother in a second. But Jamie is like your dentist patient.
Speaker B
She's a four four. She found her story. Of course, she found out her genetic risk by accident. Now, you and I know that if you are two copies of the APuA four gene, your lifetime risk is 91% that you're going to develop it. It's almost a matter of when, not if.
And the problem is that, fortunately, there's only 2% of the population that are double copy. 20% of the population is a single copy of the ApOE for. But people are now finding out because there's commercial genetic testing by accident. 23 andme. 23 andme, right.
And then they go to Doctor Google. It's me and my friend Doctor Google. And they're like, well, what does this mean? And they go, and so the Jamies of the world are finding out day in and day out by accident, and they're trying to figure out, what does this all mean? So the story is on her half is how she found out by accident and how it affected her.
My half of the book is, is it a good idea to be tested? What are the consequences of being tested? What does it mean? And so that's what my half of the book, it's a nice convergence of two storylines that help people to become informed, because this is happening every day. Of the week, it's happening anyway.
Speaker D
But what your book fighting for my life suggests is that by knowing that it can motivate people to take control of their life and their lifestyle and address the modifiable risk factors. That is exactly right. And I want everybody who reads the book to be like your dentist patient. Right? Yeah, she was.
Speaker B
I have to say to you, I had one other. Not sure I would go to her at 90 years old to clean my. Teeth, but she got to 90. She was right. And working.
Still working. And I've seen only one other elderly person get to late eighties, nineties, a four four who was unaffected. In my career. I've always said that if you have that genetic profile, it's almost a foregone conclusion you're going to get Alzheimer's dementia eventually. But there was one exception to that.
So we want everybody to be the exception, not the rule. Now, one of the things we haven't really talked about yet is the role of sugar in the brain. Yes. And many people may remember Ronald Reagan's favorite food was jelly beans. Yes.
Speaker D
And he got Alzheimer's. Now, maybe there's a correlation, but it turns out that diabetics have four times the risk of getting dementia. That is correct. We sometimes talk about Alzheimer's as type three diabetes. This is Susan Delamante from University of Rhode Island.
Speaker C
Brown. Yeah, brown. Yes. And the truth is that we all have control over whether or not we get diabetes. This is almost 100% preventable and reversible disease by changing our diet.
Speaker B
Right. And do you know that insulin resistance, of course, is the hallmark of type two diabetes? And that we can see insulin resistance in the brain, and that's what the type three diabetes, even if you're not having insulin resistance in the rest of your body. And we think that, of course, and I strongly, strongly believe, like you, that that's a modifiable risk factor that we can alter that we can alter it, of course, the epigenome, which we're going to talk about, I hope we're going to talk about epigenetics, but the diet and the reducing the sugar intake and the diabetes risk is something we can alter and have a positive effect on. So we all learned, I mean, I learned in medical school that your brain uses 25% of your glucose and it needs sugar to run.
Yes, it does. And the PET scans show that you need sugar to make your brain light up. So the rule of thumb on a PET scan is you want your south of the neck, you want to be dark north of the neck. You want to be bright on sugar. Pet, because if it's dark below, you got cancer.
If it's bright below, you got cancer. If it's dark, that's why you would put it in the brain. You want it to be nice and bright. You want that brain to light up because it consume much of the sugar metabolism is in. But you also say in your book, in patients who have Alzheimer's, that people are exploring the role of ketogenic diets, which means no sugar and lots of fat and the brain running on ketones instead of glucose.
And the issue that people are trying to decide is, can you bypass insulin pathway mechanisms? So if you're relying on insulin and pathways related insulin to nourish your brain and you have insulin resistance, either you can pharmacologically improve that or you can dietarily improve that.
Speaker D
Yeah, I mean, you know, I remember this patient I had at the ultra wellness center in my practice in Lenox. And she came in, she was about 78, and she started having what we call MCI, or mild cognitive impairment. And she had a whole bunch of things wrong with. Her favorite was bad. She had gut issues, she had low vitamin B, twelve.
She had heavy metals and mercury. But she was able to fix a lot of these things and do a lot better for many years. And then she started decline. And I'm like, well, let's try a ketogenic diet. And we got someone to work with her and cook for her.
And it was like the lights went on again. It was pretty dramatic, and I think there's some preliminary studies that are showing. That and people have been looking at. So the ketogenic diet all starts with the whole coconut oil conversation, which is coconut oil is controversial by itself, but the story behind ketogenic diets is that we do understand there's insulin resistance. The NIH actually funded a study looking at ketogenic diets.
Speaker B
So I think the science is there. It's just a matter of being able to prove it and more importantly, to adhere to it. Ketogenic diets, not easy. Not easy. It's not new to neurology.
We've been using ketogenic diet to treat childhood epilepsy for 30 plus years. So it's new to Alzheimer's, but it's not new to brain disease. It's been used to treat other brain diseases for a long, long time. But, you know, fundamentally, it's really hard to diet to stick to. Yeah, we're finding more and more people are doing it.
Speaker D
It's one of the hottest diet trends out there. If you look at all the best selling books, it's not mine, it's the keto books. And we're seeing just much more interest. And we're running keto programs at Cleveland Clinic. They're our most popular programs, which is pretty amazing.
So people seem to be willing to try it. I know you had Dan Perlmutter on a few weeks ago, and Dan and I have David Perlmutter, he and I have had an Internet debate about this. And I, and I will say to you that I think it's more nuanced. I think that ketogenic diets that are insulin sparing make more sense in the symptomatic phase of the disease. And I have to tell you, I look at Alzheimer's disease in a dichotomous way.
Speaker B
There's the presymptomatic, and then there's the symptomatic. Symptomatic disease means mild card impairment, dementia. And I think there is some logic to a ketogenic diet in the dementia phase. I agree. I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Speaker D
Is Benjamin Franklin correct? I think the ketogenic diet is a pound of cure. It's a pound of cure, but I would not necessarily advocate for it in the pre symptomatic phase. I'm more advocating for the mediterranean diet in the pre symptomatic diet. And that's the beauty of your book, is you talk about how to create resilience and health, so you don't need the pound of cure.
Speaker B
Correct. Because Hoper's life isn't to be restricted and restricted. It's to actually be more resilient, healthy. So you actually are resistant to these diseases. That's correct.
Speaker A
Right. So it's actually exactly the right idea. There are so many things that we can do to put the ball back in our court to write this script and tell our own story, you know? Can you definitively, 100% prevent Alzheimer's in every case? Well, no.
Speaker E
I mean, there are certain pretty rare genetic causes where basically just about anything you're going to do, you're going to get Alzheimer's, and it's going to probably start early. And that's unfortunate, but that is an exceptionally rare number of cases. Most cases of Alzheimer's you can do something about. Based on the 2020 Lancet Commission. An.
Amazing study based on twelve modifiable risk factors. The person makes brain healthy choices, prevent four out of every ten cases of Alzheimer's disease. Wow. Like we didn't learn that in med school. Medical students now aren't learning that in medical school.
It takes 10, 15, 20 years for something to be learned in medical science to be translated into clinical practice. And I think it's important for this podcast and people like us to share this news because there are so many things a person can do. So you ask me, what can a person do? I want them to know there's so many things. At least twelve.
At least twelve. Well, so, you know, in our study. I think there's more, but there's at least twelve. At least twelve. You know, in our study, we recommended, on average 21 different things that a person can do, and those were individualized per person.
In our whole universe. Of our study, we recommended almost 50 things that a person can do. 50 things that influence the brain that you've identified. Yep. And it's, you know, this isn't, this isn't radical, this isn't rocket science, this isn't like, you know, I'm, I'm a simple man.
I did not graduate first in my med school class. I did pretty good and I worked pretty hard. But, you know, I just, I try to just see things from the patient's perspective and there are so many things that are evidence based and safe. The two categories I would start with just to kind of set the stage are pharmacologic and non pharmacologic. And I want to get it get granular, because the word pharmacologic doesn't just mean drugs and prescription drugs, it also.
Speaker D
Means food is medicine. Well, food is, food is definitely medicine, although that got sidetracked to non pharmacological. Vitamins are medicine. Oh, vitamin. We challenge you, Richard, because I think that food is actually real medicine.
Speaker C
The phytochemicals compounds in food are biological response modifiers or single transaction changers, and they have similar effects as drugs. In fact, many drugs come from the phytochemicals in plants. So I would just kind of make us think about that a little bit. Well, actually. So I'm glad you brought that up, I would say that traditionally speaking, and let's talk through this, this is, this is a great opportunity.
Speaker E
So traditionally speaking, I've always framed it and I'm open minded. So this is great as pharmacological. I'm just teasing. This is exactly why we're doing this. This is exactly a meeting of the mind.
Gloves are off. Let's, let's go. So, drugs, vitamins, supplements and medical foods are the classic things that I personally have categorized in the pharmacologic session and then in the non pharm section. I've included diet, exercise, sleep, stress, a whole bunch of things, learning new things. But what you bring up is important.
And you have a colleague named doctor Robert Krikorian, and he's an amazing guy. He's a neuropsychologist, and he's fought the good fight. Kind of like us. He's. I don't want to say he's had.
Yeah, in some ways, he's had contrarian views because he's tried to do randomized studies using nutrition. He's done studies on the ketogenic diet and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and he's done, you know, studies on blueberries and omega three s. And what he's done is he's taken the food, and he said, okay, it's not just about the blueberries. We did the study, and wild blueberries are better. Well, why?
Because of this. It's called anthrocyanin. And then he gets down deep into it. So I completely agree that food is medicine. 100% agree.
I completely agree that the specific chemical nutrient compounds can be isolated. But I think it's too reductionist to just say, let's just put a pill of anthracyanins and prescribe them, because it's the milieu. It's like with caffeinated coffee is good for brain health. Well, is it the caffeine? Is it the coffee?
Well, no. They think it's like some substance x during the brewing process. Right. So, you know, depending on which way you look at the science, I would prefer that food is medicine. It's just sometimes I understand the bucket.
Speaker C
So I'm just kind of playing with you. But I. I love it. But I think. I mean, when I.
When I put a patient, for example, on a ketogenic diet with Alzheimer's, and they wake up and their brain becomes alert and they remember their son and their daughter, and I'm like, well, how is that less a drug than some other drug that doesn't even work that we're using? Like Aricept, right? Yeah. It's impressive. Yeah.
Speaker E
No, I mean, I just. I just feel like all of the different paths, like, you know, some people call, like, nutrition, I don't know, not mainstream medicine like that. To me, as a western doctor, that doesn't make any sense. To me, nutrition is like, I got very little nutrition education in medical school, and I think that's a terrible thing. I learned a ton, and I had to.
My better half has a master's degree in nutrition from Columbia, and she's taught me a lot, I think, through osmosis. Explains everything. Ah, there we go. It's always the better half. And she informs the less, the less enlightened one.
So, you know, I guess what I'm trying to say is nutrition is the cornerstone of how we practice physical exercise and precision exercise, precision nutrition, these are all the things that are developing and really become the cornerstone of our care. So you're talking about the twelve, then the 21, and then the 50, and maybe there's going to be 100. Tell us more about the granularity on that. Sure. You were using these, you know, and I just want to sort of frame it for people.
Speaker C
You did a study that you published, I think, in 2019, which. Which surprised even you were using this approach, looking at a personalized assessment of these biological factors that could be modified and then individualizing the treatment, that you not only slowed the decline, you not only stopped the decline, but you reversed the decline, which is something that has never really been seen except in a couple of trials like the finger trial, and I think there's a new one coming out, the pointer trial. So those are also lifestyle trials. And so you really have sort of cracked the egg and published something that should have been on the front page of every major newspaper, the lead story in every evening news, and yet it was like crickets. Yeah, well, I mean, we got the Wall Street Journal and CNN and the smother.
Speaker E
So I'm okay. I'm okay. But for me, it was like, it was. It should have been like the NIH should have gone, oh, Richard, here's $10 billion to get going on this. Like, that's what it should happen.
I have to be careful. But, you know, the NIH doesn't really fund what we do. And that's been. It's very hard. And listen, the NIH.
I've engaged with the NIH over the last year or two, and there's definitely been more interest. But, you know, I talk about crickets years ago, a decade ago, when I started this whole thing, more 15 years ago, there was nothing. There was no. There was no funding for any of this. So, you know, what I would say is what our work shows is that when you individualize care and you give people a plan, and I know you've asked me at least three times now, what should people do?
What I'm trying, why I'm delaying things, is because it really, truly needs to be individualized. And what we use is a term called the ABC of Alzheimer's prevention management. Based on the data we get data on a's, the B's and the C's. A stands for anthropometrics. Anthropometrics is basically a fancy a word for body composition.
What is your body fat? What is your waist circumference? What is your muscle mass? Depending on these factors, we're going to change the recommendations we give. The B stands for blood based biomarkers.
We're going to look at markers of lipids, cholesterol markers, also advanced markers that preventative cardiologists use, for example, that, you know, most neurologists honestly don't really pay attention to. We look at metabolic markers, insulin resistance, we look at inflammatory markers, we look at nutrition markers. Instead of saying, okay, well, go eat fish, it's good for you. We're going to look at the markers in the blood. We're then going to tell you, based on your blood and based on your genetics, how much fish you should be eating, what types of fish.
So the take home point is we're going to get granular with every patient. The other thing we do is in the blood based biomarkers, we look at genetics, we look at the apoe four variant. It's the most common risk gene. Doesn't mean you're going to get Alzheimer's if you have the variant, but it increases your risk. Well, if I know that you have the apoe four variant, they check for this in 23 andme, and millions of people have gotten this checked.
I'm going to personalize your care differently. If you have the variant, I'm going to give you plan a, B and C. If you don't have the variant, I'm going to give you a little bit modified. Plan X, Y and Z. If you have two copies of the variant, you have a different plan altogether.
That's only 1% of the population. So the take home is we take all these markers, and then the circumstances is cognitive function, and we understand a person's cognitive baseline. We look at memory function, language abilities, learning abilities, speed of processing attention, and executive function, which is higher order processing. We take all of this and the patient's medical history, we learn about the patient, we learn everything we can about them, about their family, and then we personalize a plan. So those 21 different things are based on that person individually.
And, you know, there's a lot of overlap, if you want me to say, okay, well, what are the core things? Exercise on a regular basis. Okay, well, exercise on a regular basis is good, but every person gets a different plan. If we're putting someone on a plan, for body fat loss, we're going to give them a different plan. Steady state cardio, for example.
Some people would call that zone two training, steady state cardio at 60% to 65% of your heart rate. There's different ways to do this through lactate testing, through a variety of things that we do, you know, more precisely in our clinic. But we put people on these steady state cardio plans fasted in the morning as long as they can tolerate it, because that way it jump starts body fat loss. If we have people that don't do any muscle strength training because they don't like it, we educate them to say, I don't like it either. I'm not mister big muscles over here, but I have to do strength training once or twice a week, minimum.
Because if you don't have muscles, you can't boost metabolism. We put people on these very specific plans, high intensity interval training. I really believe that high intensity interval training is almost necessary for people with at least one copy of the APoE four variant. And this is what has been studied now in a couple of studies. And yes, we need more research, and the studies out of Norway were good, but we need to personalize an exercise plan.
We need to personalize a nutrition plan, we need to personalize a vitamin and supplement plan. In some people, we do use drugs. Drugs are actually not commonly used at all in our research, although we do use them on occasion. We'll use a variety of drugs, usually at much lower doses than maybe the regular community uses. But when it comes to management, equal opportunity.
If there's data and it's relatively safe, I'll entertain it. So we recommend cognitive activities that will have a spillover effect. Learning something new, learning how to play a musical instrument, learning a new language. These are things that may have a protective effect, build backup pathways. Believe it or not, even learning how to play a musical instrument in mid life has protective effects on cognitive outcomes in late life.
And that's. There's hope for me yet. There's hope. There's hope for you yet. I got my bass guitar over there.
Speaker C
I got blisters on my guitar. I'm not just. But my big problem is I don't know how to tune it and I don't. I am so musically inept that I probably. There are good apps and things to do.
Speaker E
There's a website, it's called you got a pen? It's called YouTube. YouTube, you may have heard of it. Almost as many people watch YouTube as listen to your podcast so you can learn how to play guitar on YouTube. I think you can do it.
Ok, I'm going to try for sure. That's my December end, January and February, March. So the take home point is engage your brain, treat your brain with respect, love your brain, make a plan for your brain. What does that mean? Make a plan for sleep?
If you exercise and exercise and exercise, some people say colloquially that that loosens the amyloid, the bad protein that gets build up in the brain of a person with Alzheimer's. But if you're burning the candle at both ends and you're not sleeping during sleep, especially deep sleep, that's when a person has the trash come, the trash man comes, they pick up the garbage and they take it out and they take it to the trash heap. That is the restorative part of sleep. And if someone isn't sleeping, you know, at least seven, seven and a half, 8 hours of sleep is usually the goal. As we get older, it's, you know, harder to sleep that much.
But making a plan for sleep, prioritizing sleep, you know, we have people that track their sleep, that track their exercise. I'm wearing a wrist device here. I have nothing to disclose, but we've done, you know, several research using this, this device. I track people on my phone. I have my phone right here, and I can check how much exercise they've been doing, how their sleep, how much deep sleep.
I can see their blood sugar control. I can see all these different things on my phone because my patients share their data with me. And when I talk about data sharing, it's not just about tracking sleep. It's not just about doing exercise. It's about tracking it, determining the response, talking to your physician about it.
Granted, it's hard to find physicians that will take the time to talk to you about this kind of stuff. Tracking your blood sugar. There's at home devices called continuous glucose monitors. In our program, we take a very, very deep dive and we learn about all of these different metrics, and we refine or fine tune the plan that we give them based on their real time measurements so I can keep going. There's stress modification, transcendental meditation.
Bob Roth taught me a ton about this. What about mindfulness based stress reduction? You can take a course online. Mindfulness based stress reduction has amazing outcomes when it comes to brain health. The list goes on and on.
There's no one magic pill or one magic cure. But there are a variety of. Huh, I was going to say pharmacological and non pharmacological. But you're reevaluating how I say this. Now, there are a variety of interventions that are evidence based and safe that I think all of us need to learn about, whether we talk about fasting.
And I like the term time restricted. Eating better, meaning not eating for 1214, 16 hours overnight, at least four or five days a week. I use the term fasting for a more prolonged fast, 24 hours or more. And that's a different discussion. There's the ketogenic diet.
There's the mediterranean style diet. There's the mind diet. There's components of each diet. Green leafy vegetables, wild salmon, grass fed beef, better than non grass fed beef because of the omega three s. There's so many devils in the details.
Half a cup of blueberries and strawberries two to three times a week leads to better brain health outcomes and cognitive outcomes. In the nurse's health study, you know, many years later on, there's dark cocoa powder. There's so many things that I can drop in as key things, but the take home point is all of these things need to be individualized. So let me ask you this, because, I mean, you know, first I want to just kind of feedback, because when I'm listening to you thinking you're a neurologist, but you're also an immunologist, a cardiologist, an endocrinologist, a gastroenterologist, a nutritionist. I mean, right?
Speaker C
You're breaking down the paradigm of medicine, which is we should stay in our lane, focus on our organ, and leave the rest, everybody else. Yeah. And your insight here is that the body is a system that everything's connected to everything. You can't just pick out one thing and work on that, like amyloid or tau or whatever, and get to the problem. Yeah.
And, you know, it's sort of like trying to, you know, bail the boat while there's holes in it. You gotta fix the holes. And essentially, the holes that you're talking about are all these ways in which our brain gets injured by our lifestyle. And by our environment. And you didn't mention toxins, but that also plays a large role.
And so all of a sudden, we have to sort of rethink our whole approach, which has really been a reductionist approach. Single disease, single drug with a single outcome. There was an article in JAMA number years ago called shifting thinking dementia. You probably saw it. And they said in that article that we combine categorical misclassification with etiologic imprecision.
And in English, for those listening, that means we categorize dementia according to symptoms, not the causes. And we are not very focused on the etiology or the causes. We're focused on the symptoms. And we say, well, you can't remember this, and you fit this profile on your neurocognitive testing. You have Alzheimer's or you have this kind of dementia, or lewy body, or blah, blah, blah.
And the reality is that you could have ten people with Alzheimer's who need ten different treatments. And that's exactly what you're talking about. That's heresy, Richard. That's heresy in medicine, honestly, because we really have a very, very restricted reductionist view of disease that doesn't let us actually even study these things. And I've literally had arguments with top leading researchers, like heads of research at major institutions, saying these are all the factors that affect the brain.
We want to study them together. So I don't need to study one thing at a time and then see how that works. Then one thing. So study exercise, and then study nutrition, then study vitamin D, then study fish oil. I'm like, no, that's not how things actually work.
It's like, it's like you have to use all the whole picture. The other thing I sort of wanted to sort of touch on was that you're sort of introducing a concept of the personalization, which, again, is very different in medicine. It's not one size fits all. And you're talking about very sophisticated personalization based on a whole set of biomarkers and tests and things that are easily accessible but that aren't normally looked at and that aren't normally tested. You get your typical panel, your thyroid, your b twelve, you get your spinal fluid done, you get your mrI, and you go, okay, you got Alzheimer's.
It's sort of a little bit more complicated than that, but it's really a fairly narrow window of biomarkers and metrics, and there's bazillions of them. And I think we're just sort of touching the tip of the iceberg on this. And I've seen in my patients, when you start to apply these concepts of personalized care around food, around exercise, around sleep, around stress, around supplements, around everything, that you really begin to see dramatic changes in brain function. Yeah, I often joke that I'm like a one third neurologist, but a preventative neurologist at that. I'm a one third make believe.
Speaker E
I will, full disclosure, I'm not a preventative cardiologist, but I'm a make believe preventative cardiologist, one third primary care doctor, and make believe preventative endocrinologist. I don't even know any preventative endocrinologists. If you find one, introduce them to me. I was trained in an environment. I went to a six year medical program where I was in med school from day one.
University of Missouri, Kansas City. I knew I wanted to be a doctor when I was 517 years old, wearing my white coat. And I did so much internal medicine during med school. I had, like, an extra year of medicine because that's the way our training was. And I don't know if it was that or I'm not sure exactly what it was, but Alzheimer's disease is a medical disease.
Yeah, full stop. That's it. There's this thing called the skull, and it's a hard thing that protects you when you fall, but it's just like, when you have medical conditions, it can affect your kidneys. When you have medical conditions, it can affect your eyes, it can affect your heart. The same thing.
It can affect your brain. And I couldn't agree with you more. People can take different roads to Alzheimer's, and you have to figure out what road they're on and get them the heck off that road. Women, for example, are, unfortunately, many times in the fast lane to Alzheimer's. Women.
Two out of every three brains affected by Alzheimer's are women's brains. And 510 years ago, I would say I didn't know why. And now I think I can answer that question. And it's related to the perimenopause transition. It's related to specific life factors.
It's related to women being maybe a little bit more at risk if they have the apoe four variant. So the take home point here is, if you understand a person's individual risk factors, whether it's biological sex, whether it's medical conditions, whether it's what's floating around in their blood, whether it's what is their cognitive function at baseline, you have to figure these things out, and then you have to target that plan and personalize that plan. And, I mean, Alzheimer's disease and brain health needs to be treated in a medical way, because if it's not, if you're just targeting amyloid, you're missing the boat. You know, amyloid's a marker. And I think, hopefully, one day, we're going to have, just like we treat diabetes with lifestyle interventions and exercise and as well as certain targeted drugs that, honestly, some of them actually do, do tend to work pretty well.
I'm not the biggest fan of insulin. Like, that doesn't. That's maybe band aiding to me, that's probably too late. I mean, I'm not the best, whatever, but some of these new, you know, new things that are pretty interesting. I won't get into specifics, but I hope that one day we treat Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline like any other chronic disease of aging, where we hit things with a multimodal, evidence based and safe approach that requires a medical intervention.
Speaker C
So, essentially, what you're saying, to paraphrase, is that Alzheimer's is not a brain disease. Correct. It's a systemic disease that affects the brain. Yeah, I really believe that. I have to be careful saying that.
Speaker E
Is this being recorded? And it's gonna be broadcast to billions of people around the world. Great. My field, I was just trying to. I was just gaining some fans in my field, and now it's all a decade of work.
Speaker C
You were at the forefront of a paradigm shift that's happening throughout medicine, which is the breakdown of the old concepts of disease, from simply this reductionist, organ based, symptom based model to systems thinking and network medicine. And that's really all you're talking about. There's very strong, compelling evidence at this point that bacteria are the cause of neurodegenerative diseases. Not my. Yeah, we talked about Rudy Tanzi, who's a harvard scientist.
Speaker D
One of the discoveries of some of the presenilin genes, which are the genes that show that people are at risk for early Alzheimer's. He actually said they were discovering all these microbes in the brain, which we thought was sterile, and that we had this blood brain barrier that protects us. And you're saying. And he's saying that that barrier is not always 100%, and that stuff can leak through. Not only can you have a leaky.
Speaker A
Gut, but you can have a leaky brain. Look, bacteria. Not to scare people. Bacteria love the brain. Why?
Speaker F
25% of the body's glucose is used by the brain. They're. They're. They're. They know where to eat.
Speaker D
They. They're going to, you know, le Pen or that fancy restaurant is downtown, like everyone else is eating downtown. They're getting, you know, our brains. Bacteria live on ketones, 100%, but not. But not.
Speaker F
Wait, that's very important. They prefer simple sugars. Why? Because they're lazy. Right?
They want, you know, they want instant gratification. So they like sugar better than ketones. But ketones and ketotic diets work for some of these neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's and even LS and brain cancer. That's right. That's right.
And I think one of the mechanisms, to be honest with you, is that ketones actually improve. First of all, they improve mitochondrial function, but they're not a good substrate for bacteria. They're a great substrate for us. Bacteria don't like them because they like eating fast food, basically. So feed them sugar, we eat fat.
That's right. Okay, so this is just a breakthrough idea, and this isn't just an idea. You've actually treated patients using this approach and seen some really extraordinary things. Yes. So can you share with us a little bit about this case you were sharing with me earlier about ALS, which is a horrible condition.
Speaker D
Stephen Hawking had it. It was called Lou Gehrig's disease after baseball player, essentially, is where your nervous system is affected by the killing of the neurons in your spinal cord, which makes you basically paralyzed. You got fasciculation, which is twitching. You eventually can move your arms and legs. You're in a wheelchair, you breathe, you need a respirator.
Speaker F
You wouldn't wash it on your. On your worst enemy. You would not work. You know, it's like slowly getting paralyzed. Right?
Yep, that's right. Never has there been a treatment that has stopped or reversed it. Right. And you're saying that you've seen patients where this has actually happened, so. Well, we are in the process of validating that sort of.
That data. Yes. So, yes, we need more studies. Yes, we need to do research on multiple patients. But even if there's one patient, right, where you've seen a change, it raises.
The question, oh, by the way, it's made me go crazy, by the way, because, you know, I am so. I'm finally glad to be a neurologist. You know, being a neurologist is like being a nihilist or a masochist diagnosing audios. Right. What's worse than that?
It's like diagnosing. Let me, you know, let me not tell the patient that they have ALS. Let me. Let me treat them for, you know, like a, you know, a CIDP picture, because they don't want to actually make that diagnosis for people. It's the hardest diagnosis you could make for a patient because everyone knows ALS is incurable disease.
Right? I mean, it's 100%. Even pancreatic cancer is better. Well, you have a 5% chance of living a pancreatic cancer. You have zero chance of living through this disease.
Zero. So based on your hypothesis that it's infectious, that plays a big role. If not, is the main role. I personally shared on this podcast that I went to a place in Mexico called San Aviv, where I and my wife both went through this treatment called hyperthermia, which essentially is where they heat you up to 107 degrees, which sounds crazy and is scary, but actually, we did both fine, and it killed a lot of infections that we had. My wife, her viral loads of very tough to treat infection called CMV came plummeting down.
Yep. She felt much better. I felt much better. And so this is a therapy that is not much used in the United States, but is used widely in Europe, is used in Mexico and other countries as the therapy for some of these types of infectious diseases and even cancer. Right.
Speaker D
So how does the theory work behind this with something like ALS? Well, the idea is that, you know, fever is the way of actually denaturing spores. That's a big sentence. Can you unpack that? Sure.
Speaker F
So human cells have their proteins that either fold properly or not fold properly at a certain temperature. Bacteria have their own temperature zone, like their ideal climate, and spores have another ideal climate, meaning that to kill a spore. A spore is like a baby bacteria. A spore is a baby bacteria. And that's what I believe, personally, is the reason that patients have amyloid accumulation, that the spores are creating this protective cover against antibiotics that actually is, in fact, the amyloid being produced.
Speaker D
The amyloid's like the armor for the bacteria? Yes. They're like the, you know, the bomb shelter. Yeah. The biofilm is the bomb shelter for these little baby bacteria.
Speaker F
Yep. And so how does hyperthermia work to disrupt that? And what is. What is that procedure? Well, so it works.
Hypothermia works by. It's a very narrow window of temperature, meaning if you give too much temperature, you can actually hurt normal cells as much as, you know, bacterial cells. If you don't give enough temperature, you've done nothing. So it's like goldilocks. It's like goldilocks.
Speaker D
You gotta get it just right. You have to get it exactly right. Okay. And that's part of the way that the hyperthermia technology has been developed, is by really understanding that the brain itself can provide feedback on the tolerability for human cells, because brain cells are going to tell the brain, hey, this is pretty hot in here. You don't want to fry your brain, right?
Speaker F
Can you turn the thermostat off now? So the part of. The. Part of the device actually is to get the brain temperature back into the feedback system, where it's self regulating, so that you never reach a point where the temperature is harmful to your own cells. And so often in places where they do this, they'll give.
Speaker D
At the peak of the temperature, they'll give antibiotics or antivirals. Does that make sense? To give antivirals or. Yeah, to give antimicrobial treatment to patients when they're at the peak of the fever. Because the idea is that it sort of flows.
Speaker F
Yes. For acute infection. Yes, I would argue that. Well, if a lyme is acute, certainly. I mean, I don't think that.
I mean, I think you gotta be weary of the. Of the issue that by, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul, for instance, let's say that C. Diff is. Let's say. Let's.
For argument's sake, say this is a poly microbial disease, okay. As opposed to a. Like, lots of different bugs. Lots of different bugs. As opposed to just one ringleader that everyone else is following.
Okay, so Lombard believes that C. Diff is the ringleader, okay. And all these other guys, Lyme, HSV, they're just tagging a ride because it's such a great killer that it's like, okay, great, we'll take the leftovers. No problem here. We'll take the leftovers.
So my concern is clinically that if we start treating patients, you know, with bacterial drugs like rocephin, whatever it is, for chronic lyme. Yes. You're dressing chronic lyme. I mean, the c. Diff gets worse.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So the heat alone is enough to disrupt the c. Diff. It's.
Well, we haven't demonstrated that yet, to be quite frank, but what's been demonstrated is that by applying hyperthermia, that we're able to actually see improvement in clinical symptoms of patients with ALS, people's muscle strength. This is a progressive disease, so it gets worse and worse and worse. Every visit. They're worse. You're seeing patients, it stops or gets better, which never happened.
Correct. So this is a major breakthrough. I think so. Major breakthrough. And this is not something new.
Speaker D
This has been around for a long time. So where in the world is most of the research being done on hyperthermia for ALS, period? I mean, it's mostly. So most of the research on hypothermia actually is cancer research. So they call it chemothermia.
Speaker F
Chemohypothermia. So people can look up a lot of data on how hypothermia affects cancer, but as far as I know, there's zero data until now. Applying hyperthermia for ALS. We'll be the first people to actually talk about applying hyperthermia for treatment of ALS. What about things like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or miss?
Well, the difference in those diseases are that in Alzheimer's. Right. It's very difficult to induce hypothermia in a patient with Alzheimer's disease. Why? Because you need to be compliant.
The treatment itself is, you know, it's fairly rigorous, as you know, from your. They put me to sleep. They put you to sleep. Right. We don't want to put them to sleep, though.
Right. Because we're concerned about protecting their brain. So, you know, if you have a patient who's got, you know, end stage Alzheimer's disease, for instance, I don't see how this is going to be held early, but. Early, 100% early. Early.
In fact, I will talk later, not about the case now, because we're really just in the beginnings of this case. But yeah, I think it applicable for Alzheimer's disease as well. Have you seen any patients? No. Reported or.
Definitely not anywhere? No, but you serve as a theory. Yes, still a theory. And Ms. What about MS?
Ms, there's data on actually the opposite. Right. Which is how do you induce hypothermia? Because in MS, it's a, you know, it's an inflammatory disease, obviously. Right.
Which, by the way, I also believe is caused by clostridium, but not C. Diff, where it's especially important to actually identify at that stage that this is bacterial. So there. I don't know what they're. Yeah.
Speaker D
So what is the idea with Ms that you wouldn't want to use hyperthermia, that you wouldn't want to use heat because it makes it worse. Remember, when you heat up a patient with MS, what happens? They usually get worse. So the trick is. But maybe not enough, right?
Maybe it's not enough. That's right. Maybe you haven't reached the threshold to actually, you know, use the body's fever mechanisms against. Because there's links to Ms and Epstein Barr virus and other infections. There's links to Alzheimer's and herpes virus infections.
Speaker F
Right. So, yes, the whole principle is applicable for all those diseases, but we don't know yet if it is applicable yet until we clinically demonstrate that. Right. But, yeah, I think that this is going to be a treatment that's going to be very important for a lot of different diseases, Mark. So there's this whole theory that the body has a mechanism for dealing with this, and it has these own proteins that are produced in response to heat.
Speaker D
And there are things we learned about in medical school. They're called heat shock proteins. And I learned something very important about heat shock proteins from doctor Lessler, because remember that people looking at how to induce hyperthermia. So there's all sorts of research. There's actually even a drug in clinic for ALS.
Speaker F
That is the mechanism of action is based upon increasing heat shock protein through a pharmaceutical agent. I was at this lecture and I thought I knew everything, basically, and I learned that actually you could induce. Because you thought MD stood for medical deity, is that it? Medical deity, yes, exactly. We all got that draining.
Speaker D
The truth is, we know close to nothing. That's why I said the beginning of this talk. Thanks for inviting me, but I really know nothing. Just disclaimer. But anyway, so, yes, actually, in MS, the goal is to induce heat shock protein through hypothermia.
Speaker F
Hypothermia. So you get people cold? Not people, the brain. The brain, right. How do we do that?
Speaker A
Chill the brain. Chill the brain. How do you do that? Ice blocks around the head. No.
Speaker F
No. Well, I'll invite you up and you could see for yourself what that looks like. All right. Dunk your head in ice water. Nope, nope, nope.
None of the above. Okay, so we have to be in mystery here. A mystery about what the device looks like, you mean? Yeah, it's basically the same concept as building a hyperthermia device. Except remember now, the technology itself was developed basically for anesthesiologists.
This was developed at Yale by Doctor Abreu, who's the person who actually discovered a way of measuring brain temperature objectively externally. Okay, so that's kind of where this whole thing started from, to be honest with you. And we don't have to stick electrode in your brain. You can literally map it out from the outside. You could map it out from the outside.
So the ability to do that now allows a clinician to not only, you know, heat the body to create hyperthermic states, but through other types of modalities to actually cool the brain safely externally with the same. In the same way, meaning that you can actually apply a small device to a region of the of the skin, it's periorbital location, and you can actually change the temperature of the brain through this, what's called a brain thermal tunnel.
Speaker D
Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share. It with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best. Practices on how you upgrade your health.
And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman, and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes and lots more. And now you can have access to. All of this information by signing up for my free marks picks newsletter@drheiman.com.
Markspicks I promise I'll only email you once a week on Fridays, and I'll. Never share your email address or send. You anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey, and I. Hope they'll help you too.
Again, that's drheiman.com markspicks. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy.
This podcast is separate from my clinical. Practice at the Ultraviolet center and my. Work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health. Where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my.
Guests opinions, and neither myself nor the. Podcast endorse the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for. Professional care by a doctor or other qualified, qualified medical professional.
Speaker A
This podcast is provided on the understanding. That it does not constitute medical or. Other professional advice or services. If you're looking for your help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. You can come see us at the Ultra Wellness center in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Just go to ultrawellnesscenter.com dot. If you're looking for a functional medicine. Practitioner near you, you can visit ifm.org and search find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who's a license healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of.
Speaker D
My mission to bring practical ways of. Improving health to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like. To express gratitude to the sponsors that made today's podcast possible.
Speaker A
To express gratitude to the sponsors that made today's podcast possible.
Speaker D
To express gratitude to the sponsors that made today's podcast possible.
Speaker A
To express gratitude to the sponsors that made today's podcast possible.