Dr. Diane explains how infections can cause or contribute to brain fog by entering the brain through a leaky blood–brain barrier or by involving the meninges, triggering inflammation, reactive oxygen species, and neuronal damage. She links chronic immune responses to plaque formation (with possible dementia implications) and emphasizes holistic management: identify specific infections, lower inflammation, restore the blood–brain barrier (including via gut microbiome support with pre/probiotics and short-chain fatty acids), and correct systemic imbalances such as high cholesterol to promote recovery.
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Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane here in this video, we're going to talk about brain fog and infections. Now, there's a lot of different ways brain fog can occur from infections. So one thing that can happen, for example, is we can get infections actually into the brain, right? So if infections themselves get into the brain, this sometimes happens through a leaky blood brain barrier. The blood brain barrier is really designed to keep things out of the brain that are not supposed to be in the brain, which. But when the blood brain barrier becomes leaky, then things get in the brain that are not supposed to be there, and infections are one of them. So infections, once they get in the brain, they can do a lot of things. They can cause a huge amount of, say, killing to try to start happening inside the brain. As the body mobilizes molecules to try to kill these infections, what will happen is a huge amount of stress happens in the brain. Something called free. Free radical stress. And when this free radical stress, like stars, what happens is the body creates something called a reactive oxygen species, which is basically a molecule that kind of steals molecules from other cells and causes this cascade of problems that essentially will wind up leading in many cases to the nerve cells to die. So this sounds very scary, and it is. But there's also. I also want to take a moment before I go on to remind you that we can regrow our nerve cells. So we want to make sure that our nerve cells aren't dying like this and figure out why. But I don't want to leave you with this information feeling freaked out. I want to leave you with this information feeling empowered and hopeful that just because this. This process, if this is the process that's going on, just because this is going on doesn't mean there's not, like, hope for recovery, right? The nerve cells can regenerate. We know that. So what can happen in this process? Like I said, we get infections in the brain. We can get nerve cells dying that can lead to a level of brain fog. Another thing that can sometimes happen is these. These infections can get into the meninges. The meninges is the outer covering of the brain. Typically when this happens, like most commonly, we get a level of meningitis, but it can feel sometimes like we have that when the infections can get into the brain. Brain, because you can sometimes feel, like, this pressure that's around the head, right? So we can get headaches and migraines and these sorts of symptoms in addition to brain fog. Another thing that we want to consider with infections in the brain and this whole process we want to consider inflammation and we want to consider how the body responds to it. So there's one study, for example, that's even suggesting that plaques that build up in the brain and are associated with dementia, for example, are sometimes chronic create it because plaques have an immunological component to them. And so it's theorized in some research that the reason why we might create plaques that can lead to brain fog and dementia is our body actually trying to trap infections and get the infections out. Of course this goes haywire and then we aren't thinking and we have memory loss. But any of these mechanisms are really what is largely going on here. So in working with infections in brain fog, there's a few different things that are important to consider. One, what are the infections? Right? Not all infections are treated the same. So we want to as much as possible understand what infections we're dealing with. So that's one thing. Another thing that's really important is anti inflammatories taking that inflammation low down as much as possible. We want to absolutely do that. We also want to restore the blood brain barrier. So one thing that can help with this is probiotics. It's like, and this is where there's so much talk about the gut brain axis, right? There's a huge link between the gut and the brain. And this is one area we actually see that the good microorganisms of the gut, which we can feed by giving prebiotics, giving them their food, we can take probiotics, but the good microorganisms of the gut will actually create something called a short chain fatty acid. A short chain fatty acid has a lot, there's a different types of short chain fatty acids, they do all sorts of different things. But one thing we see with short chain fatty acids is they can help repair the blood brain barrier. So we want to make sure that when we're working with the brain and we're working with the infections, we're thinking about the gut. And this is an area where I feel like, you know, giving details is so important for understanding. But one of the biggest take home points that I want you to understand with this comes down to this. What's happening is the body is connected, what's happening in the gut impacts the brain. Infections in the brain can happen because of a leaky brain, while the gut can repair the brain. One of the things that will actually cause the blood brain barrier to be leaky is high cholesterol. So I'm telling you all these different things because the body is very complicated. But what I want you to have as one of your main take home points is if you're seeing imbalances in your body, even if it might seem unrelated, there might be, and there probably is a relationship, because the body, we share nerves all over our body, we share centralized blood flow, we have hormone cascades that go all throughout the body and influence cells, you know, very far, very far away from where the hormones in the body are produced. So that being said, we want to think about and we want to really analyze where are all the imbalances in the body, because that helps us bring the body back to full balance, right? So, for example, you might not realize that if you have infections in your brain and you have brain fog, there could be a connection to having high cholesterol, but there is. So we want to really kind of think about this holistically and say, where are all these imbalances? And in working with brain fog and working with infections, restore all of these different imbalances back to balance. So, again, I'm Dr. Diane. You can see information about my clinic in the show Notes. Subscribe to this channel if you like. And please don't keep me a secret. Please share me with your friends and family. I'll see you next time.
