Brain Fog Got You Feeling LOST?

Hey, if brain fog has you feeling lost, this video is for you. In this video, we are going to cover what is brain fog, why does it happen, how to know if you have it, what tests to run, and finally, we're going to end with the very, very, very important question: what really causes brain fog? And remember, the cause is so important to understanding how to get rid of it. The cause is connected to the solution. When we know the why, we begin to know the how. So welcome back to my channel, everybody. I am Dr. Diane Mueller. I am your Lyme, mold, and chronic illness expert. And let's start this off. So what is brain fog? So brain fog is essentially this non-medical type of condition meaning non-medical, meaning it doesn't have a true diagnosis, right? You're not going to go to a doctor and they're not going to diagnose you with brain fog. It's more going to be a symptom that is associated with many other disease scenarios. But people with brain fog feel oftentimes like their head is in the clouds, like their brain can't function. It can feel heavy, it can feel pressure, it can feel like it's really difficult to sleep. There might be word-finding problems. There might be memory issues. You might find that you're with a friend and you're like forgetting their last name and you've known them for two decades, right? So all of these things can be different manifestations of brain fog. The brain is just in this like slowed-down processing mode. Now, when it comes to brain fog versus dementia, many people with brain fog get worried about something with like dementia, and we can see that there are tests you can take. There's online tests and tests that have been researched. This is our Mini Mental Status Exam. The Mini Mental Status Exam is used in medicine oftentimes as a part of a screening for dementia. It's not the only thing used, but you can find these types of exams online, take 'em, and oftentimes what you find with things like brain fog is you find changes. You find changes on the Mini Mental Status Exam. Typically with somebody that has these symptoms, they're not going to be in a dementia type of category. But the problem is they could be in a category that medically we would say is like a mild cognitive impairment. Mild cognitive impairment in many ways is a precursor to things like dementia. It's saying like, hmm, things are not working correctly, but this is not a true dementia diagnosis. So from a medical perspective, we could say brain fog's kind similar to that mild cognitive impairment diagnosis. Problem is, statistically speaking, we do see people with dementia start early on with mild cognitive impairment, but nothing is done, right? And so if we have brain fog, if we have mild cognitive impairment, the time to act is now before it gets worse and before we get to that dementia standpoint. So why does this happen? Why do we get foggy? There's a lot of different reasons, and truthfully, in science and medicine, we are still trying to understand it all. But some of the theories out there are things like this: we can have situations where we could have too much sugar in the brain, and then we get neurological dysfunction, and the brain doesn't work very well because the brain actually has too much sugar in it. And it's almost like a brain version of diabetes, right? We see that even with Alzheimer's. But of course, Alzheimer's doesn't just start overnight. There's these early warning signs. So we got to consider, like, blood sugar in particular. Do we have insulin resistance in the brain? We can also see that anything that is going to inflame our nerves— these types of things that inflame our nerves are going to prevent the brain from working as well as it ideally should. So then we have to take a step back and say, okay, well, we need to look at anything that can inflame the nerves and this neurological inflammation. And One of the things that drives me nuts is when people say that inflammation is the root of so many diseases. Well, I got to get rid of the inflammation. I got to get rid of the inflammation. I got to get rid of the inflammation. That's similar to saying that firemen are the root of all fires. So anytime we have a fire, hopefully we have firemen and firewomen, fire people there. Well, the fire people did not actually cause the fire, right? But they show up to help. Help with the fire. Same thing with inflammation. Inflammation doesn't just start. Inflammation is the body trying to protect itself, trying to heal itself, trying to repair itself. So yes, inflammation oftentimes is showing up in scenarios like brain fog, but we still have to take a step back and say, okay, well, if the inflammation is causing this neurological dysfunction, why is the inflammation there to begin with? And that's what we're doing at these end of end of the video is talking about these root causes. So next, how do you know if you have it? Well, from a true brain fog standpoint, there's not a perfect way, right? This be especially because in medicine it's not even a real diagnosis. Now that's silly in many ways, and it's silly in a lot of ways because it's a very real symptom, but the medical community has not yet gotten to a point where they say, oh Oh yeah, this is something that we are actually, you know, going to diagnose, right? And so from a standpoint of how— if you like knowing if you have it, basic things, right? If you're walking into a room frequently and saying, wow, why did I come in here? Where did I put my keys? You know, those things can happen occasionally during high stress times or overwhelm. So just because you have a day where your brain is tired and is maybe not working at full capacity does not mean that this is brain fog. With brain fog, it really does feel like your brain's almost in mud. Like, even the processing is slower. So with brain fog, you might be in the middle of conversation and you might find yourself having a hard time really tracking conversation. Of course, that could be something like ADD as well. But if it's not, if you're— it's more around like, hey, my brain's so heavy, I'm just having a hard time concentrating. It's not like an ADD thing where your brain's jumping from this activity and that activity. And it's more this distraction. With brain fog, it's going to be this like just really slow processing. You're going to be reading and it's like you can't even— hard to— it's even hard to process what you're reading, right? Those kind of things are huge signs of brain fog. Sometimes with brain fog, we even see people have headaches and migraines and other symptoms. Usually with brain fog, it does not come as a standalone symptom, it's with other things. So are there tests for brain fog? No, because it's not a real true medical diagnosis. And I say that cautiously and compassionately because what I want to make sure you hear is like, this is a very, very real, very real symptom, right? But in the medical community, we haven't like put this diagnosis to it where there's like a specialty of tests to, to really identify the brain fog. Now what's always important is like, you know, talking to your doctor, your neurologist, considering things like MRIs to make sure that there's not problems that are actually things like neurological problems, you know, space-occupying lesions, tumors, these types of things that are creating this. But provided you've done some of those basic workups to just rule out the bad things, then brain fog is just a symptom then of other things. It can be useful, like I said, to do things like a mini mental status exam where you can get a sense of where you are. There's, um, cognitive executive function tests that are also available. These are things where you do things, for example, like you get timed on how many times you can hit the spacebar in a minute, right? Because that's actually showing a level of brain function. You'll be in these types of things— in the cognitive function test, you will be given like directions, and then the directions will go away and you'll have to execute something on your keyboard and it's fairly simple directions, but you do have to pay attention to follow them. And so with brain fog, oftentimes you'll find that you fail these sorts of tests because you can't remember these types of step-by-step directives. But from a standpoint of like truly diagnosing brain fog, it's more of just a symptom of how we describe this conglomeration of brain's not thinking, brain's cloudy, things are not working, those, those sorts of scenarios. And then when we get into the root causes, okay, so the root causes of brain fog, very important. So again, we already talked about possible blood sugar, right? So insulin resistance. Remember, with blood sugar, you don't want to just get a glucose and hemoglobin A1C run. You also want to get a fasting insulin run. Fasting insulin is a very early warning sign of blood sugar issues. You can also get a HOMA-IR run That's another marker that talks about insulin resistance. So insulin, fasting insulin, and HOMA-IR, two really great markers to just see if your, your brain and your body is functioning normally from an insulin standpoint. From then, other things that can cause inflammation. This is where we want to think about our whole toxin family and get toxin tests run. So these are things from anything from pesticides, herbicides, other environmental toxins that you might have heard of, things like BP, uh, BPCs and parabens and phthalates. So all of these environmental toxins can play a role on brain inflammation. We can also see that toxic metals, glyphosates, PFAS chemicals, all of these things could impact brain function. And then of course our family of mold and mycotoxins. We also see links from a standpoint of chronic hidden infections. COVID, EBV, all of our chronic other viral panels, our HHVs, our CMVs, right? All these viral panels can really be important. We want to look at Lyme, other stealth infections like Bartonella and Babesia, and really consider that again, any of these types of things I'm mentioning, I mentioned because they have, they have evidence of potentially causing inflammation and even destruction to the nervous system. System. Some of these toxins will actually cause our nerve cells to die, and that obviously is incredibly inflammatory to the brain and to the nervous system. So those are the top things you want to think of. Remember, we also have this gut-brain access, right? So things that are happening in the gut can really directly influence the brain. Sometimes brain fog can even come from neurotransmitter imbalances. So if we have an imbalance in things like cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline, dopamine, right? Um, cortisol is not a neurotransmitter, but neurotransmitters and hormones, even things like thyroid disorder, right? Because if we don't have the energy, and especially in a low thyroid scenario, brain's not going to be functioning like normal. So we want to consider the hormone side of things. Too much histamine in the body could even potentially cause brain fog. So we want to think about allergies. We want to think about things that are raising histamine in the body. Sometimes people have a hard time with histamine-inducing foods. So that's a good thing to look up is foods that induce histamine production in the body. So all of these different things. So there's so many potential root causes of brain fog and the testing for brain fog that really is effective is the testing that is actually looking for these root causes of inflammation. So we can see what the cause is. And then the, you know, response to it, the treatment for it, is not like a specific nutrient for brain fog. It's not like there's like, oh, you take this supplement, you take this medication, brain fog goes away. Doesn't tend to work that way because the cause is so different from person to person. So really working on that cause is essential. So if I can help you, my clinic can help you in any way, please do check out my clinic at MyLyme, L-Y-M-E. Lyme, like the disease, not like the fruit. So at mylimedoc.com. So that's L-Y-M-E. So mylimedoc.com. Say that a few times, make sure you guys got it. I'll put it in the show notes as well. But thank you for listening. I really would appreciate if you guys do send this to other people that need this information. I think the way we are approaching some of these things is just not, unfortunately, going after the root, and people are chasing the, the root, kind of like, you know, chicken with their head cut off, which my mom did grow up on a farm, so I know all about the, you know, chickens can actually run around with their heads cut off. And this is very real, right? This is like what can happen in medicine as we're running around chasing all these things and we're not actually trying to find the root, and we're running around with like, like a headless chicken with like no real vision and no direction. So I think that's all for now. Thanks everybody for listening. I'll see you in another video.