Can You Reverse Cognitive Decline?

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. And I'm so thrilled to have my good friend and extraordinary scientist, Dr. Dale Bredesen, joining us today to talk about the end of Alzheimer's. Can you believe it? There is a possibility that one, we don't have to get it, and two, that we can even reverse it in early stages. It's really radically new thinking. So many of you may not be familiar with Dr. Bredesen. He's not one of us Internet doctors or promotional guys. He's actually a real scientist. Unlike me, I'm just a regular practicing doc. And he's come at this whole world of Alzheimer's through understanding the root causes from a scientific point of view and through his extraordinary research. He's with the Buck Institute. He was a member of the National Advisory Council on Aging. He's an extraordinary work in this field and is really a leader and has done really pioneering work in the field of Alzheimer's research. So I'm thrilled to have him today to talk to us about Alzheimer's, which most of us are pretty scared of. Right, because it's such a prevalent condition, it affects so many, and yet there is no treatment of the, you know, 400 and change studies have been done over the last decade or two. 99.6% have shown no benefit. And the ones that show benefit are basically, oh, well, you delay going to nursing home by a couple of months. So it's been a massive failure because we're dealing with things in the wrong way. So let's talk first about how you got into this whole field of Alzheimer's and what led you down this path.

Well, thanks very much for having me, Mark. I really appreciate it. So we started the lab 28 years ago and the idea was that the greatest area of biomedical failure had been the ability to develop effective therapeutics for neurodegeneration. Lou Gehrig's disease, Alzheimer's disease, Lewy Body disease, Parkinson's. We really haven't had something to reverse the process. And so what we started the lab around was the idea of could we understand the most fundamental nature of these diseases, the molecular basis, so that we could fashion the first effective therapeutics. And I have to say what has been really interesting is that all the laboratory work has supported what you published back in 2007. So I probably should have looked at.

That way back solution. Yeah, that was way back when.

10 years ago, you were talking about these same things. And so what's really interesting is we came at this from a completely different strictly out of the test tube. I knew nothing about functional medicine, which is why I believe in it so strongly now, because we ended up at the exact same place, even though we came from the test tube.

Yeah, it's so powerful. So what are the challenges? Because it sounds like you went down a traditional road, looking at the mechanisms and trying to find the single drug target, find the drug to hit that target and reverse Alzheimer's. But none of that worked. And you come up upon a very different theory of how it all happens and what to do about it, because the conventional approach really failed you. Right?

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. When we first started the lab almost 30 years ago, my wife, who's an integrated physician, said to me, you know, whenever you guys come up with in lab, you know, it's going to have something to do with the basic things that we treat in medicine. I said, no, no, no, no. We're going to find one molecule, one region, one domain. We're going to fashion a drug against that one little thing, and that's going to reverse everything. So I was wrong. I should have listened to her, you know, ago, obviously. So what happened?

Always listen to your wife. They know best.

Right? I know, I know. I made that same mistake that many of us make. So what happened, though, was we started to ask the question, what is Alzheimer's? What is the fundamental nature of this problem? If you think of cancer as a fundamental change in the division of cells versus the turnover, what is the fundamental nature of Alzheimer's? Because people spend their whole careers on one theory. It's reactive oxygen species, or it's, you know, it's metal binding something. But there's some fundamental. What is the linchpin here? And what we found was really surprising. What we found was that there is a balance. Just as you have this beautiful balance in osteoporosis. You've got osteoblastic activity. Got osteoclastic activity. And when that gets out of balance over time, you get osteoporosis. What we found in the cells that.

Build up or break down bone to recycle it, it's process of taking away and then building up. Right?

Exactly. It's like working on your house all the time. You're taking a little away, you're putting a little on, you're doing this. But for 20 years, you only do the demolition and you never do the construction. Your house is going to get smaller, smaller, smaller, which is just what happens to your bones. So what we found is the same thing happens in Alzheimer's disease. It's essentially synaptoperosis. You have synaptoblastic activity and there are dozens of things and signals that contribute to that. Things like estradiol and things like nerve growth factor and brain derived neurotrophic factor, vitamin D, you know, on and on and on. Then you also have, on the other hand, synaptoclastic activity because let's face it, you know, we are forgetting the seventh song that played on the radio on the way to work yesterday. All those sorts of things, that's normal. We're remembering only the most important things. How to drive, how to speak, how to do your job, all those sorts of things. And so we found that there's this beautiful balance and we started to look at what actually affects that balance. And guess what? It turned out to be all the things the epidemiologists have been telling us about. So things like your hemoglobin A1C. If you have pre diabetes, you are at increased risk if your homocysteine is high. So then the interesting finding out of.

This was a folate deficiency, right?

Exactly. You have a folate deficiency and your homocysteine starts to rise. You actually, of course it's also associated with inflammation. Big problem for cardiovascular disease. So what we found is that what is referred to as Alzheimer's disease, it's actually a protective response which is 180 degrees different than we had been taught a protective response to three fundamentally different insults. And you go into these in your book. So one is chronic inflammation, huge issue. And you can literally follow the molecules down. So for example, you get inflamed, you activate ns, kappa B, it goes into the nucleus, binds to hundreds of genes, turns on the very genes that cleave to make the amyloid. So you actually are triggering the production. Amyloid is literally a part of your innate immune system.

And that's the stuff that gunks up the brain. It's like basically stuff that just causes Alzheimer's in your brain to kind of get clogged up.

Exactly. So it's the stuff that the pathologist looks at and says, okay, this person had Alzheimer's disease because of that amyloid, which is a little peptide that's cut from a bigger protein. And this protein, which is amyloid precursor app will go one, it'll either go to making synapses or it'll go to removing. Just like osteoporosis, you got the synaptoblastic synaptic.

You've actually got to take out the stuff that's causing your cells to Break down and put in the stuff that makes your cells grow and renew, which is a very radical idea that you can actually reverse cognitive decline. I mean, we all learned that Alzheimer's a one way street, dementia is a one way street. Maybe we can take drugs that slow it a little bit, but there was no idea that you could actually stop it or even turn back the clock. But that's what you're finding, right?

That's exactly what we're finding. So what we're finding here is that if you understand the signaling, so you look at many, many different parameters. Currently we look at 150 different parameters. Then you can see whether it is the subtype 1, the inflammatory, the subtype 2, which is the atrophic, or the subtype 3, which is the toxin related, it's protecting you from something. And often it's a combination of things as you know. So you have to get in there and you have to change and optimize each of those things. So this is, you know, we've heard from Dr. Hyman before, take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff. And that's exactly what this is at the molecular, you can see it literally at the molecular species level, striking. So when you now look at what's wrong, each person, no surprise, is different. So we tell the patients Alzheimer's or.

Dementia, there's many different types. And that's what we're learning, is that you have to treat the specific thing that's going on with that person.

Right. And this is all called Alzheimer's. It's just that when you really look closely at it, it's not one disease, it is different subtypes and each one requires a different optimal treatment. And indeed each person requires, requires a different optimal treatment. And that's where programmatics and computation are really, really helpful.

Now what's amazing is that this has never been done before. I mean, you know, we say, well, you can reverse diabetes, you better die. But there is nothing out there that gives anybody any hope for this horrible condition that is really going to cripple our society. It costs more than cancer, heart disease to take care of Alzheimer's patients. And it's just affecting all the caregivers. It's really a crisis and you're giving hope in a way that has never happened before. So talk to us about your book, the End of Alzheimer's, because I think this is a book that is really revolutionary that everyone should go out and buy today because it will change the way you think about taking care of your brain. We know how to take care of our hearts, but most of us have no clue how to take care of our brains. And that's the most important organ in many ways. So how in the book do you talk about the principles of fixing this? What are the main principles in the book?

Yeah, really good point. So what happened was back in 2014, we published the first peer reviewed paper that showed, here are the first 10 patients. And by the way, there are over 1,000 now, but we had 10. Nine of them had shown clear improvement. And we got over 5,000 emails and calls saying, how do you do this? What are the details, the specifics? So that's why I wrote the book. The idea was, let's put everything down here, all of the scientific principles, how did we get here in a form that everybody can read. It's for caretakers, it's for patients, it's for doctors, it's for neuropsychologists, it's for health coaches, coaches, everybody. And so you can see how this came to be and you can see all the tests that you need to get what their value should be. And for example, you've been teaching us for years that our fasting insulin should be below 5. And absolutely that is critical.

And by the way, the normal is like less than 15 if you look at the lab test, right, if you look at the reference range, because that doesn't tell you what's optimal, it just tells you what's normal, which is the average population. And for average population having high insulin is normal because most people are overweight, needing a ton of sugar.

This is exactly right. So in fact, we talk about within normal limits. That has, as you know, nothing to do with optimal function. So I always tell the patients to come through, okay, we're now going to treat you like a competitive athlete. It's no longer good enough to be at the low end of normal. You want to be optimal in everything. And when you now change all these things. So the book goes through all the different tests to get all the different things to do. And then it has many different cases and people who improved. It documents how they were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, how they had neuropsychological testing to show where they stood before. We had one guy that went from 3rd percentile in his neuropsych testing to 84th percentile, another guy whose hippocampal volume went from 17th percentile to 75th percentile.

Okay, stop there for a minute. Stop there for a minute. So what you just said was remarkable. You said the hippocampus is the memory center of the brain. It's what shrinks during Alzheimer's. You literally can regrow that you can increase the size of the part of your brain that is responsible for memory. That is a radical statement. And to go from what, what you said 10% to 75%, so went from.

17 percentile to 75th percentile. And it's interesting, we have a person going in who was less than 1 percentile. She's getting her follow up today, so we'll see what happens. But she's done extremely well clinically, essentially back to normal functioning. And so we're going to be very interest see where her hippocampal volume stands today.

I'm gonna share a quick case that I saw last week and I want to hear some of the cases in detail. But you know, this is sort of an example of what can be done if this model is applied. I saw this guy was 61 years old. He was diagnosed with dementia by top docs at Harvard, full testing and was told to get his affairs in order. At 61, he didn't recognize his wife. He couldn't speak full sentences, he couldn't read a clock for five years, which is a clear sign of dementia. And that's one of the things we have people do, is write a clock and look at the hands and where they are. And I found out that in fact he had a very, very high sugar diet even though he wasn't overweight and that he had Lyme disease that was, I think neuro Lyme as well as some other tick infections that were affecting his brain. And he had very high levels of mercury. So we began to address all these factors and it wasn't just one thing. I put him on a ketogenic diet for his brain. I helped treat him for the Lyme, we got him specialist treatment for that. And we got him starting to get his mercury out of his system. And within eight or nine months, it was extraordinary. He came back in the office, he was speaking full sentences, he could read a clock for the first time in five years. He knew who his wife was. He was talking to his daughter about all her friends and where they were and what's happening. He remembered, you know, all the things he needed to get into the building where he had to go to the doctor. We needed his wallet with his id. I mean, something he just never was able to do. And I just sat there and I just, you know, I just could not believe it because my paradigm is so fixed that dementia is a one way street. Even though Intellectually, I know. You know, as a traditionally trained doctor, it's hard for me to believe, to be honest with you. And I see it and I'm like, wow. So it's pretty remarkable. And it's something that I think not everybody can experience that dramatic change, but I think a lot more than we think. And I'd love to hear some of the cases you've had and the things you found that have made the most difference.

Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, you said something really interesting. Here's the guy who comes in 61. I'm sure his symptoms didn't start yesterday.

No.

So his symptoms started in his 50s?

Yeah, yeah.

When I was.

He couldn't read a clock for five years, since he was 56. Right, there you go.

When I was training in neurology, there was no such thing as a person in their 40s or 50s coming in with Alzheimer's disease. And we're seeing it all the time now. We have many, many people who come through 51, 52, 49, 53. It is absolutely striking. So to get back to your point about a patient, so we had one guy I mentioned earlier who came in with the third percentile and had actually documented he's APOE 4 positive. So he has the main genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's, which not everybody has. But as you know, if you have zero copies of APOE 4, your lifetime risk, about 9% if you have a single copy, lifetime risk about 30%. If you have two copies, lifetime risk over 50%. There are 7 million Americans who are APOE 4 double positives. So they should all be on a program. But of course, we've been taught don't even look because there's nothing you can do about it. But that, as you said, it's all changing. And in fact, many of us are beginning to see this sort of thing. And as you know, we're actually writing out the paper with you as co author documenting 50 cases where you see this dramatic improvement. We're seeing it again and again and again, well documented in people who have this now. Also, as you said, the earlier, the better it encourages you. If you're at genetic risk, get on a prevention program. If you have even the beginning of any changes, go early, get on a program, get on a comprehensive program early. And as I said, one of the guys came in and after he got dramatically better, said, I've allowed myself to talk to my grandchildren again about the future. He had, literally, because he had been told by his neuropsychologist he was Headed for a nursing home. He was told, you know, just, I'm going to not talk because there is no future. Now this guy's actually opened a third business. He already had two sites. Now he's opened a third site. He's doing absolutely great. And he says, you know, I talked to my grandchildren about the future, and.

What was it that. What was it that you did for him?

So he had. So we looked at these again, all these different parameters. In his particular case, he had a combination of things. He had, for example, example, he had a very high homocysteine. So we did end up giving him methyl folate, methyl B12P, 5P, bring down his folate. He actually was taking a little too much alcohol at the time. Not a tremendous amount, but a little more than was good for him. He was eating a french fried diet.

Oh, yeah.

So we got him on a good fats diet instead of a bad fats diet. Get him off the acrylamide of the french fries. So we address basically the metabolic things we also look at in his particular case. Luckily, he did not have type three. He didn't have the toxin associated, but he had mostly a metabolic associated. He also had a few hormones that were too low. His thyroid was too low. So correcting, and not just correcting, but optimizing these things. He's on a great exercise regimen, which he does for an hour. He's a real kind of exercise nut, which I think really has helped him a lot. And so when he went back to take the test and it was interesting, he said, you know, I don't want to go back to take the test because I did so poorly last time. He said, look, I know I'm better. My wife knows I'm better. You know, I don't want the neuropsychologist to tell me I'm not better. So he finally said, look, just give it your best. You know, you're doing better. And his scores were just, you know, gone through the stratosphere.

Wow.

So, you know, it just. It just confirmed what he already knew.

Yeah, pretty amazing. So, you know, what you're talking about is actually embedded in your book, the End of Alzheimer's, which, again, I suggest everybody get a copy of it, because if you have a brain, you really need to read this book. And the program you call the Recode program. So can you tell us about that? And what are the elements of that program? Right.

So we call it Recode. That's for reversal of cognitive decline. And my sense is, you know, functional medicine is the most powerful medicine right now, most powerful medicine on Earth. It is the thing that is taking these complex chronic illnesses and turning them around. And the next stage, you know, Functional Medicine 2.0, which as you know, Lee Hood calls P4 medicine, is really to bring in more of the larger data sets computation. You know, Mark, if we give you your whole genome on a piece of paper, it's very hard for you to look at it and say, oh, here I'm reading my whole genome.

What does that mean?

Right, Exactly. But on the other hand, your computer tells you, oh, Mark, your MTHFR is fine, or your APOE is three or what have you. And we need to have the same things available for metabolome and proteome and of course, microbiome and lipidome and all these things. So these, for the first time, will. Will actually tell us unequivocally what are the root causes of these illnesses. And they literally will be like our intern helpers that can basically say, okay, Mark, I can read these large numbers of base pairs and things like that for you and give you a leg up on understanding and helping your patients. So that's.

You're going to be doing a study in Providence health system with Dr. Leroy Hood, who's the head of the Institute for Systems Biology, looking at exactly collecting all this data, helping learn about these patterns in the data, and actually applying that to people. But let's just go back to the recode program for a minute because, you know, how do you start with people? What are the steps you do? What are the dietary recommendations? What are the kinds of interventions you would do with people? Because I think people really want to know and it's in your book. But I think let's just get a little flavor of some of what that looks like, because people are like, wow, you can reverse Alzheimer's. What the heck are you doing? And it turns out it's pretty obvious most of the time.

Yeah. So what you do. So the idea here is Recode looks at 150 different parameters. Things like your homocysteine and your HSCRP and your copper zinc ratio and your pregnenolone and DHEA, all these sorts of things. And importantly, your mycotoxins. You know, as you know, many of us are exposed to mycotoxins, don't even know it. Or we're exposed to high levels of mercury, don't know it. Or we have chronic Lyme or babesiosis or bartonella, and we just don't know it until someone looks. So you look at all these parameters. And then you go back again to the basic biology. If you have cognitive decline or risk for cognitive decline, then you have one or a combination of three things. Chronic inflammation, you know, and that can be from organisms, as you were just mentioning, or it can be from other things. Can be from too much sugar, you know, too much advanced glycation end products.

Call that type 3 diabetes. Right?

Absolutely, absolutely. And then you can have an atrophic state. If your estradiol or free T3 is too low, or your reverse T3 is too high, pregnenolone is too low, vitamin D is too low. Again, you want these things optimized.

So what that means. Wait, just stop. Not everyone knows all the medical terms. So atrophic means not enough of something to help something grow. Right. So how do you provide the ingredients for your brain to grow? You need the right balance of hormones, you need the right nutrients, basically the ingredients for a healthy, functioning brain. And many people are very low as they get older because of absorption issues, because of change in metabolism that affect their hormones. All that is really important to look at.

And because of PPIs, one of the most common ones, you know, your zinc goes way low, your magnesium goes way low. The acid blocking drugs. Yeah, absolutely. The acid blockers, they block acid, but.

They also block mineral and vitamin absorption. Which creates a problem.

Yes, exactly. They block good health as well as the acid. So you look at those things and then of course, the third piece is all the various toxins and you need to know. And so then you get toxins being mold and mercury, biotoxins and chemical toxins. And of course there's a possibility for physical toxins as well. We don't know how important EMFs are yet in this process. It's very possible that they play a significant role. We don't have a good way to measure the effects in a simple clinical lab yet, but they're certainly possible. So then what Recode does for you, it's a computer based algorithm that will tell you what percentage of each subtype you have.

So you basically get all this data, all this lab stuff, all their history, you put it in the computer and it pops out saying based on these analytes, you have high mercury, or you don't have enough hormones, or you have these low nutrients, or you have mold possibility, and then you basically decide what to do.

Right, exactly. It'll tell you you have 30% type 1, 35% type 1.5, for example, and maybe 20 type 2 and maybe 15% type 3. That sort of Thing. So you can look at exactly what each person has for the different types. And then based on that, of course, it fashions. It'll tell you, look, if your main problem is glycotoxicity, which is the type 1.5, then you want to focus first and foremost on that. Maybe you're going to have berberine or maybe you're going to be, you know, maybe you're going to be on some alpha lipoic acid. Maybe you're going to be on a high sugar Dr. Hyman diet. You know, all these. Exactly. So this is basically your book on diabetes, helps people to actually, to help their brains to get them in the optimal status. Most people have insulin resistance who have Alzheimer's. In fact, there's a beautiful report by Professor Ed Goetzel from ucsf, and he looks at neural exosomes. These are literally tiny, tiny little fragments of cells 1 70th of the diameter of a red blood cell. Tiny fragments that actually go back and forth between neurons in the brain and your blood and actually cycle back as well. So you can literally measure brain chemistry in real time in a blood sample. And what he showed was that everybody with Alzheimer's has the signature of insulin resistance in the brain, whether or not they have it peripherally.

Yeah. Which is, you know, most people don't realize that sugar is. Doesn't just make you fat. It acts as a brain toxin. And small amounts is fine, but, you know, as you get older, you lose muscle. People don't exercise. Their diets, you know, could be the same as they were in younger, but they eat all the carbs and starch and sugar. It actually, they become more pre diabetic. Half of everybody over 65 is pre diabetic. And depending on what definition you use, I bet it's more like three quarters. And so that, that's a big concern.

It's a major risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and something that is very addressable. And again, each one of these things by itself may not be a cure for you, but when you put the whole thing together, as you know very well from functional medicine, things start to work like never before.

Yeah, I had a patient a long time ago when I first started all this, and I was like, he was diagnosed as having low blood flow in his brain, early dementia. And I'm like, like, I don't know what to do, but, like, let's just look at everything and see where things are out of balance. And it's like a car with 100,000 mile point, you know, checkup where you look at all the variables and it analyzes what you need. And then you. You basically just tune it up. So you. We tune up his diet, we balance his hormones, we gave him testosterone and thyroid, and we optimize his nutrient levels. His homocysteine was high. We fixed his gut. We. We basically dealt with all those factors. And like a year later, we went back and had another scan and it was like, dramatically improved and his cognitive function was improved. And he lasted 10 years, more years. And I lost touch with him and was doing great. And I was, like, I said to the neurologist who's the head of the memory disorder center at Harvard, you maybe know him, Dr. Kirk Daphner. I said, how did this happen? Like, I don't understand. Like, I just did this and this. And he got better. He says, yeah, well, the brain is resilient and it's responding to many insults. And when you actually provide all the optimal things that the brain needs, it can start to recover and repair. And that is really the promise of your program Recode is that it's a way to deeply analyze what's out of balance and then create a program that's individualized for people to actually get back in balance using some very simple things. We're talking about very simple things here for most people. Diet, exercise, sleep, stress reduction, basic nutritional support, hormonal support. Then it gets a little more complicated when you have to deal with heavy metals or mold or tick infections. But for most of it, it's very straightforward and stuff people actually don't even need to see the doctor for most of the time, they can actually learn how to do themselves.

Yes, we should be able to reduce the global burden of dementia. And as you indicated, some people are going to need intranasal VIP and are going to need bed spray, and they're going to need cholestyramine, but many people won't. And that's why it's so critical to look, so that you'll know who needs a completely different plan, who just needs to cut out the sugar, you know, who needs a little bit of estradiol. So the point is, everybody's different. And you must look to see what subtype and what are the critical factors that are reducing your cognition.

Let's look at what you've contributed. Is this an extraordinary synthesis of enormous amounts of science putting into a practical program that people can use and use with their doctors and actually stop or even reverse dementia? And it's just so exciting. I want everybody to take advantage of this. I want Everybody to get this book, because there is no other map for ending Alzheimer's like this. There's a lot of guidelines around. Exercise more, you can prevent it, eat better, you can prevent it. But we're not talking about just preventing it. We're talking about literally finding people who are diagnosed with early Alzheimer's and turning back the clock. And it's, you know, it's just such a groundbreaking thing. I think, you know, you went, you should win the Nobel Prize for doing this, because it is really something that is going to change the face of not only Alzheimer's, but it's going to change the face of how we think about every single disease. Because you're a brain doctor, but I'm a family doctor. I deal with all the organs. This is true for every single system in the body. And, and this map you provided, it's just brilliant. I can't wait to get my copy of the book. I ordered it from Amazon. I encourage everybody to go pick it up and get a copy. So if someone's suffering from Alzheimer's or has a family member who's dealing with it, what's your advice to them?

My advice is to get a cognoscopy, go in and find an appropriate doctor who does this. See whether it's seeing Dr. Hyman or seeing somebody else. You want to see someone who understands this problem. What's really striking here, and as a scientist, what's really been so interesting to me is the science. The very stuff that we see in the test tube. You can actually see how APOE changes your risk for ulcer. You can see the molecules involved. In fact, we just published another paper on specific molecules that are involved in this disease. It just fits with the clinical response like a hand in a glove, perfectly. So you want to find. We've now trained 450 practitioners from seven different countries and all over the US we have another 300 coming, actually. Institute for Functional Medicine is putting on training. So we'll be there in a couple of weeks. Dallas on the 9th and 10th of September, and then early in December, there's one in Miami, and then in April, one in London. So they're training.

Miami is good in the winter.

So find a doctor near you who does this sort of thing, or take the book to a doctor who's got an open mind. And we've had some people tell me that they went and talked to their doctor about our stuff and the doctor said, I would never do that. I don't look at those tests. One said, doctors don't do Nutrition. Another one said, doctors don't have time to read, so you've got to find the right doctor. I know. And one of the things that we found is the people who do the best are the people who have supportive family members, who have attention to detail, who are diligent and who have open minded practitioners. Those are the ones who do the best. They have the best compliance and they're compliant. They do better.

I mean, that's the challenge. I mean it is not easy to do if your brain isn't working. It's hard to get everything organized and do all the steps you need to do. But think about the level of severity of this problem. This is a massive dysfunction of the brain and people who have that don't operate normally in daily life and they do need help. But whether it's a caregiver or a coach or some process in their environment that helps them stay on track, because when they have that, it is amazing to see what happens when there's a wife or a kid or somebody who's there supporting them. It's really pretty amazing. Okay, so everybody's wondering, like, I'm worried about my brain now. What are the things that I can do? What are the, let's say three to five most important things that people can do today to start protecting their brain? Because now we know we can, what do we do about it?

Right? So of course the most important is actually to get yourself checked out and see where your numbers are. Because your brain functions, as you said, the metabolism and the cognition go hand in hand, just as you mentioned with the guy at Harvard, you know, you can now improve things. So but if you ask, okay, what are the three most important therapeutic things? They go back to the three subtypes. So number one, you want to resolve and prevent further inflammation. So resolve the ongoing inflammation. And people like to use these specialized pro resolving mediators. I know there are other ways to go, but you want to identify anything that's giving you chronic inflammation. So you know, are you eating too much sugar? Are you exposed to trans fat? Do you have unknown pathogens, do you have recurrent chronic viral infections, things like that. So resolve the inflammation and prevention, prevent it. Number two, optimize your trophic support. And trophic support, as you said, hormonal, nutritional, literally trophic factors like nerve growth factor, brain derived neurotrophen, which comes from.

Exercise and meditation and sleep, decreases all that stuff.

And by the way, you know, there's this new product, whole coffee fruit extract, which increases your BDNF markedly. So that doesn't mean you should stop the exercise. You absolutely want to do that because that gives you a lot of. But there are ways now to improve all these things and make sure that your hormones are not poor. In fact, one of the interesting things that was mentioned the other day is a lot of people who've gone off iodized salt have ended up with some iodine deficiency. So make sure that your iodine's okay. Make sure that your thyroid is up to snuff and all that. Make sure that your fasting insulin critical. Get your insulin sensitivity back, as Dr. Hyman teaches you. And then the third thing to do is make sure, because I think the toughest of all people don't look. They don't know what toxins they're exposed to. So check it out. Get an ERMI score for your home. You know, if your score is overdue, check out. There you go. The animal. In fact, I've got a. I've got. Our dog here is trying to go out the door here. Where is he? Oh, here he is. I'm going to let him out the door right here. All right, here we go.

That was a big break.

Get these things checked out. You know, as you said, the animals reduce the stress levels. Exactly. If you've got chronic exposure. Look, if you've got a bunch of dental amalgams and your mercury's floating around, you know, you're the expert on this. You know, check out a provoked urinary mercury. Make sure that you're not walking around. You don't know until you check it. So those are the three. Three things to do.

That's so great, Dale. I just can't thank you enough for joining us. And your book is really groundbreaking. I know it's top of the charts already. It just came out a couple of days ago. And it's really, I think, going to change the map of how people think about Alzheimer's and hopefully all disease. And we're looking forward to more from you. I know there's a documentary coming up. I know your work is just getting started, and we're talking about major research studies that prove this model, and it's a game changer for medicine, healthcare. And I just thank you so much for the work you're doing and for actually putting the science behind functional medicine, because we see these things all the time, but people go, it's just an anecdote, but actually it's real. So thank you.

Yeah, thank you. The laboratory work supports it perfectly. And Mark, thanks again. So much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

So where should people go to learn more about your work and about the book?

Probably the best place is www.drbredison.com.

Okay. Drbredison.com and go to Amazon, Barnes and Nobles. Go to your local bookstore.

Pick up the book today, Amazon, all the above, local bookstore. They're there.

Thank you. Thank you, dad.

Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Mark. Of course.

Take care.