Dr. Mark Hyman outlines nine steps to address dementia and memory loss through functional medicine and personalized treatment based on genetics. He covers brain health prevention and recovery strategies for cognitive decline.
Now why is the name of your disease increasingly meaningless? Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. I'm going to explain that to you and also how to prevent, stop and even perhaps reverse dementia. Now yesterday I was speaking in a panel for PBS TV. at the AARP convention, that's the American Association of Retired Persons convention. It was in Boston, 25,000 people. And the topic was dementia. And there was a woman with mild cognitive impairment on the panel, sort of like pre-Alzheimer's. And everyone on the panel agreed, including the Harvard neurologist, that memory loss is not a normal part of aging. The sad part was that they didn't have much to offer her in the way of prevention. Just a very bad and pretty ineffective selection of drugs with lots of side effects. but there is another way to think about brain aging. The brain responds to all sorts of insults and the same insults as the rest of the body. Stress, poor diet, toxins, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, nutritional deficiencies and lots more. So all we have to do is give the brain a tune-up and we can see miracles. In a minute I'm going to tell you about a few miracles in my practice but you should know first that this is a big problem and it's growing every day. 10% of 65 year olds, 25% of 75 year olds, and 50% of 85 year olds will get Alzheimer's at a cost of $60 billion a year to society. And it's predicted that the number of people with Alzheimer's will triple in the next few decades. Now is this preventable? Can we slow it, treat it? I believe the answer is yes. First I want to explain just why naming the disease, whether it's dementia or anything else, is becoming increasingly unhelpful unless you want to match the drug to the disease, which is the only thing doctors are trained to do. Now, rather than surgeons, actually. Now we have to think about individuals, not diseases. You know, in medicine, our differences, you know what I mean? Our genetic differences are more important than our similarities. Now sometimes the practice of medicine lags behind science, right? And sometimes the practice gets ahead of science. Now genetic testing puts us squarely in the middle of that dilemma. In fact, we're at the crossroads where the old ideas we have about disease and diagnosis become less and less meaningful as we understand more and more about the importance of individual, namely genetic differences in controlling health and disease and determining illness. This is a time when personalized medicine will replace medicine based on diagnosis and disease. In fact, disease and diagnosis as we know it will soon be an obsolete concept, an artifact in medical history, kind of like bloodletting or phrenology, which is the art of diagnosis based on the shape of your skull. that was really popular in the 19th century. Now take for example the story of a patient who had a diagnosis of dementia and came with his wife to see me because he couldn't manage his business affairs, he'd been unable to function at home, he had to withdraw from family and relationships, and he was desperate as he felt himself slipping away. Now there is no known effective treatment for dementia, but we do know a lot about what affects brain function and aging. Our nutrition, vitamin deficiencies, omega-3 fat deficiencies, inflammation, toxins, stress, exercise, hormonal deficiencies. and many genes have been found to contribute to dementia. Now it's not one gene, right? It's the interaction among many genes and the environment that puts someone at risk for a chronic disease like dementia. And we also know that many things affect how our genes function, right? Our diet, vitamins, minerals, toxins, allergens, stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, and lots more. Now even though no long-term studies have been done looking at dementia, treating and treating dementia based on genes. There are so many scientific threads that if we kind of weave them together, we can get a picture of how and why our brains age and what genes are involved. Now, for this man whose mind and life were evaporating, I looked deeply into his genes and the biochemistry his genes controlled. And I found the places where we can improve things. He had a gene called APOE4. That's a high-risk gene for Alzheimer's disease. It also made him hard It also made it hard for him to lower his cholesterol or to detoxify his brain from mercury. He also had a version of a gene for detoxing metals and other toxins called GST that was very inefficient and it made him accumulate more toxins over his whole life. He had another gene in fact called MTHFR that made him require very high doses of folic acid to lower something called homocysteine in his blood which is a very toxic substance to the brain. Lastly, he had a gene called CETP that caused his cholesterol to be high, which also contributes to dementia. Now when we treated him and found what was going on, we found that he had very high levels of mercury. And then we helped him detoxify with foods like kale and watercress and cilantro and herbs such as milk thistle. We gave him nutrients like zinc and selenium which help detox. And we gave him medications to overcome his difficulties getting rid of toxins. We lowered his cholesterol with diet and herbs, and we lowered his homocysteine with high doses of folate, B12 and B6. And after a year of aggressive therapy that was matched to his genes, not his diagnosis, he had a remarkable and dramatic recovery. Now before I saw him, he could not manage his business, nor did his grandchildren want to be around him because they were scared of his behavior. And after matching his treatment to his genes, he was again able to function, his grandchildren loved to be with him again, Now to put this in perspective, mental decline happens progressively and sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but never gets better according to our traditional medical thinking. But just like we thought heart disease and plaque in the heart couldn't be reversed before we thought that, now we have proof that does happen. And I believe that dementia can be reversed if caught early enough by attending to all the factors that affect brain function: diet, exercise, stress, nutritional deficiencies, toxins, hormonal imbalances, inflammation and more. It's really quite simple. It's like everything I describe in Ultra Wellness. Get rid of the bad stuff, put in the good stuff and the body heals. It's common sense. But we are so far from that in the way we treat chronic illness in America today. So if you know someone with memory loss, I would be extremely aggressive in looking at all the keys to Ultra Wellness to find what imbalances are present and how to fix them. and there will be no one treatment that works for everybody because everyone is different. But here are some things to think about if you or a loved one are experiencing memory loss or dementia. I want you to look hard for correctable causes of memory loss and I list them in my written blog. I want you to find a doctor who can practice functional medicine and follow the principles I talk about in UltraWellness and they can help you find these problems. And then there are a few things you can keep in mind to help get your brain to tune up. I list these again in my written blog. Now this is just a start, but it can go a long way to giving your brain the chance to heal and recover, and for most of us, will prevent the aging of our brain. Thank you. This has been Dr. Mark Hyman.
