DHEA and Brain Health

Hey, everybody. In this video, we're going to be talking about brain health, cognitive decline, neurodegenerative diseases such as Ms. And als, and really just how to make your brain work better. Whether it's just simple, simply something such as where the heck are my keys? All the way to a severe neurological disease such as Ms. So I'm Dr. Diane Mueller. I am the founder of my Lyme Doc Medical Clinic. And, and for the purpose of today's video, I'm going to focus on something called DHEA as a treatment strategy. Make sure to check out other videos in the channel, too, because I go through a ton of different treatment strategies. It's just a lot to say in one video. So we're going to focus on this particular thing today called dhea. So what we see in research and studies is that conditions such as ALS and ms, so we have these severe neurological conditions, we see a lower amount of this molecule, this hormone in the body called dhea. If you haven't heard about dhea, stay with me. I'm going to go through what that is exactly in a moment. The other thing we see is that as we age, where oftentimes we get even normal, quote, unquote, changes in cognition, very commonly we see a decline of dhea, also associated with the aging process. So here's what DHEA is, and then I'm going to go back to kind of some of the comm controversy on and using DHEA in these processes. So DHEA is a molecule, it's a hormone in the body. We actually make it out of cholesterol. So when we have cholesterol in our body, cholesterol is not all bad. In fact, it's quite good in the right amounts. It does a lot of good things for us. Of course, you know, it's been linked to certain things like coronary artery disease. So it's like we want all these things in the right amount, doing the right things in our body. Right? That's. That's what's important. And so we see, for example, one of the things that cholesterol does is we make this hormone called DHEA out of it. DHEA is a precursor to things like estrogen and testosterone. So we make other hormones out of it. But DHEA itself has been linked to things like better cognition, better mood. And here's another very interesting thing about dhea. When we look, for example, at the amygdala, where we hold fear, we hold emotions and trauma responses, and we look at how the amygdala responds in trauma and trauma can be small traumas, such as a boss yelling at us or a fight with a family member. They could be large trauma, such as abuse and assault, right? So there's a huge range of trauma that. But trauma, small and large, can all lead to this imprint on our amygdala, on our fear center in our brain. So what we see is that when somebody has proper DHEA levels, they do not have as strong of an imprint, as strong of a memory from their amygdala, the fear, the emotion center, and the hippocampus, the memory center. That when somebody's on dhea, the. The trauma does not seem to affect their brain. And this is done by looking at imaging. These studies are looking at how much the brain lights up, you know, with trauma, when somebody's on DHEA versus somebody is not. And what we see is that the DHEA helps to. Helps to basically prevent a level of the negative impact of trauma. It's not saying it's like completely eliminates it, but that the brain does not respond as negatively as severely to trauma if somebody has enough dhea. So it's used for so many different things, and it helps to protect the brain against some of those micro traumas, right? Those things that we all are subjected to from a, you know, standpoint of emotion and memory that are just like these things that we can't always avoid. We're humans, we're going to get into, you know, sometimes conflict with other humans. We might get yelled at at some point, right? So. So this is a normal part of human life. Sometimes DHEA can help protect against the negative impacts of that and therefore help the brain process that better and work cognitively better, because it's not trying to sort out that trauma. So that's really important to understand. Now, dhea, I will tell you, is a little bit controversial from a medical perspective. And it's controversial. Controversial not in taking it, but it's controversial from a standpoint of is this normal part of aging to see DHEA fall, Right, because it's so common. So is this a normal part of aging, or is this actually a problem? Right? Is it. Is it a common, really, really common problem that's not normal, that things in our society, in our culture, in our environment perhaps, are leading to this process that's really common, but perhaps it's not normal. And there's no way to solve this, at least at this point in science, whether it's a normal and common thing or an abnormal thing. But we don't necessarily have to solve that in order to Say take action. So a simple action people can do is actually supplement with dhea. And when you supplement with DHEA, you're protecting yourselves against these neurocognitive things. You can protect yourself against some of these age degenerative things. It's not the only thing out there, right? So always, always, always remember this is a bit one piece of a very large puzzle. Check out a lot of the other videos on this channel to learn more in terms and in regards to dementia, memory, brain health, aging and more as we talk a lot about a lot of these things. And you can test your dhea. You can test your dhea I recommend to test it in its storage or sulfate form. So when you're asking for this from a doctor, make sure you get a DHEA s. That's the test you want to order. And for women, most women. And this is going to be different than the reference range. Again, this is not medical advice because I can't give medical advice on a, you know, on an educational channel. But. So you want to run this by your doctor. But what I see is that most people in my clinic, most women feel the best when their DHEA is too 200 to 300 and men 300 to 400. So that's gonna be different than what you might be told. But if you're not in that range, you could still be normal on the lab and actually not have enough DHEA to function at your fullest capacity. So I wanted you to have that information as well. So hope this is helpful. Learn more about how to get. If you have a hard time getting tested any of that, you can join my DIY program where you can order clinic clinician based labs for yourself and get access to those sorts of things. So look for that in the show notes below. And please do subscribe to this channel. It's been really great to make this video for you all. Please don't keep me a secret. Share me with your friends and family. I'll see you next time.