Brain Health and Estrogen

Hey everybody. In this video, we're going to talk about brain health. We're going to talk about some of the root causes of the brain not working as well. We're going to talk about estrogen as a great tool to help you regain functioning of your brain. And if you are a male and listening to this, stay tuned because estrogen is also important for you. It's not a female only hormone, it's a female dominant hormone. Hi, I'm Dr. Diane Mueller and welcome to this discussion. So why do we have brain fog? Why do we get some of these cognitive impairment types of issues? Well, there's four huge reasons. There's a lot of smaller reasons, but there's four huge reasons. One is not getting enough circulation to the brain. So it's a change in blood flow. The second is leakiness of the blood brain barrier changing what comes in, what's, what goes out. So it's a, it's a change in what is allowed in the brain. And the purpose of the blood brain barrier really is to make it so that only what the brain needs and uses stay, you know, gets in and everything else stays out that helps with high brain functioning. In addition to that, we also see that infections and toxins that get into the brain can cause, cause a lot of neuroinflammation, can lead to things like Alzheimer's plaques and other pathological findings, oftentimes that are not discovered until autopsy. So what do we do? So these are these four different major root causes of the brain not working so well. And like I said, these are major. There's other minor things. There's a lot that influences brain health. But of these four major root causes that we're talking about in this video, they all need to be treated differently. Right? Right. So if we have an infection issue, we need to treat that. If we have a toxin issue, we need to treat that. If we have a leaky brain barrier issue, we need to treat that. And oftentimes people have multiple components of these. Now, estrogen is really interesting because one of the benefits of estrogen, we think about it, estrogen a lot for female, you know, hormone health and healthy cycling and building bones. But there's so much more to estrogen than just this. Estrogen actually helps to improve circulation. And when circulation is improved, guess what? Brain function is improved because we're getting more blood flow to the brain. And a lower amount of blood flow to the brain means more or means less oxygen to the brain. And that can lead to a lot of problems. I mean, just think about not having oxygen to any tissue. Now, if you're a man and you're listening to this and you're like, well, that's for women. This is not true. We actually see that estrogen, while it's lower in men, has a lot of really important functions. One is that it also helps with circulation. Two, we also see that estrogen basically essentially makes testosterone stronger. So even in men with erectile dysfunction, which is not the point of this video, but it's worth pointing out there are studies that are showing that when people are given a little bit of estrogen, some of the erectile dysfunction goes away. So what we are now seeing is that, okay, estrogen has this impact of basically making the testosterone work stronger. So if somebody has low testosterone, you give them a little bit of estrogen, all of a sudden that testosterone can be working stronger due to how they synergistically work together. But for the point of this video, the point of this video is we want to treat all the root causes. But you also want to absolutely consider that low estrogen is contributing to your brain health and make sure you get proper testing. You know, when proper testing for estrogen, you really want to consider the three major types of estrogen, which are E1, E2 and E3. Sometimes they're all run together as a total estrogen, other times you'll just see an estradiol run. And that's the most potent form of estrogen for women before menopause. And so, but if you're, you know, postmenopausal, you're going to want to look at this very, very differently. You're going to want to look at these three different types of estrogen. And the other component to this is you want to consider looking at the estrogen breakdown product. So when we break down estrogen in the body to essentially recycle and reuse it, one of the things that we will do is we'll have three different components of this estrogen. These are known as 2 oh, 4 oh and 16 oh. And the proper balance of these is really important for health. When you don't have the proper balance, you might have more osteoporosis, or you might have more DNA damage, or you might have even more tendency to cancer. Right? So some of these estrogen bait breakdown products are really important to monitor. So that's kind of the down and dirty of estrogen and brain function and more. If this has been helpful, please do subscribe to this channel. Let me know if you have questions or comments. If you're interested in working with my clinic. You can find a free discovery call link to how to get a free call with my team to see if we are the right fit for you and I'll see you in the next video.