The SCIENCE Behind the BLOOD BRAIN BARRIER (BBB): Dr. Anderson's Top Tips for Healing It NATURALLY

And so people will often say, well, does it make sense to work on the blood-brain barrier when I have these other chronic problems going on? And the answer is— Hello everyone. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A, and we talk about integrative therapies and other types of therapies, answer a lot of questions on this channel. We got a ton of questions about when we're doing some discussions about neurological COVID, long COVID, mast cell activation, et cetera, is this idea of the blood-brain barrier and what it is. And how do we heal it up and all of that sort of thing? So this is what I want to dive into today. The first thing is many people have heard of the blood-brain barrier, and it kind of tells you what it is. It is literally a barrier between the circulating blood in your body and your brain. Now, it is not 100% complete with your brain. There's a couple areas where it's a little more leaky and lets stuff through, but that's because those are areas that need a little bit more of the blood in your brain to sense different things. But generally speaking, the blood-brain barrier is a very intricate layer between the circulation from the rest of your body, your heart pumping around, and the inside of the vessels on that side and the inside of the vessels on the side that feed your brain. And it does a lot of things. It has a lot of different gating channels. It has a lot of different filtration, if you will, et cetera. And one of the ideas to keep it real simple is it tries to keep what is in your brain in there and tries to keep things we don't want to go to the brain out of the brain. Now, sometimes that's done by just holding on to things. Like, we make neurotransmitters in our brain, and we don't want the ones we made in our brain to escape and go too far away, so the blood-brain barrier helps keep those in. Sometimes there are toxic substances that the blood-brain barrier actually has a pump to eject out of the brain side, for example. So it's very, very important. So next question would be, okay, if we have this blood-brain barrier and it's got these different functions— and there are whole textbooks written on the blood-brain barrier, so what I just said is the very, very shortened version of what it does— but the bottom line is When would it be damaged? Well, this is where the questions came from, I believe. Traumatic brain injuries, hitting your head, TBIs, CTEs, MTBIs, all of those head injury type things that damages the blood-brain barrier. It kind of makes sense if you whack your head that would happen. Also though, we get blood-brain barrier disruption in inflammatory processes. So people with chronic infectious illnesses, some autoimmune diseases, et cetera, they will have a dysfunctional blood-brain barrier. And then the others that have come up in other videos, we have whole playlists on these. Areas where we commonly see this would be mast cell activation patients, mast cell patients, mastocytosis, mast cell disease, mast cell disorders, and then long COVID. And the reason I think this particular question came up about what do you do with the blood-brain barrier is because in one of the long COVID sessions that we did on the YouTube channel here, which we have a playlist for that, I had mentioned that in the neurology literature, the blood-brain barrier and the brain in long COVID act like they've had a traumatic brain injury, but Generally, there's been no trauma. It's inflammatory trauma. And what that means is that you can have just functional of a blood-brain barrier from getting in a high-speed car crash or getting hit real hard in the head in a sporting event or an accident, as you can in the case of long COVID. So it doesn't matter how your blood-brain barrier got injured. You can see that there's infectious, there's autoimmune reasons, there's trauma reasons. And now in the age of long COVID, we have long COVID traumatic brain injury as well, and blood-brain barrier problems. So what are some of the things in the the research that helped to kind of heal it up? Well, the first thing is if there's trauma, you have to stop doing the trauma. That kind of makes sense. In the setting of something like mast cell disease or long COVID, you have something that's disrupted your immune function. And so you have this inflammatory reaction going on. So you have to treat the underlying problems. That's another area. But then there's some real basic things. And so we'll, we'll put a link down below. I've linked this study before, but 2019 study by Malkowitz et al., talking about how basically muscle is medicine. And that means skeletal muscle in our body moving. Now they've mapped out the chemical signals that moving our body actually sends out that not only tells other parts of our body to heal up, but actually the blood-brain barrier gets direct signaling to start to heal up. So this doesn't mean that you have to go and you have to, you know, become a marathoner or something like that. You just have to move your body in order to get the skeletal muscle moving. Now, When we're looking at this from a basic point of view, we also want to think of, well, if, if moving my body, so skeletal muscle helps send signals to heal up the blood-brain barrier, are there things that block those signals or interfere? Well, the counterpoint to muscle metabolism, which is pro-healing, is fat metabolism, which is actually pro-inflammatory. And so this again doesn't mean that, you know, you have to go on a crash diet or do something crazy. It just means you need to move your body. And fat metabolism is sort of a euphemism for insulin stimulation. And insulin's whole cascade of chemistry, which is very pro-inflammatory. Now, obviously we need a certain amount of insulin to keep the blood sugar going into our cells or we would be dead. So it's not that that's bad, but if we have a lot of fat metabolism, it's very pro-inflammatory. And then if we're sedentary, we get the opposite of signals that go to the brain to tell the blood-brain barrier to heal up. So whenever we're using the idea of just movement as medicine, which it truly is, we want to be mindful of our dietary intake and try and, you know, keep from having insulin surges, which usually is secondary to blood sugar surges. So diets that are a little more level throughout the day and that don't have a lot of simple sugars in them and things, diets that are less simple sugars, more fiber, good fats, all that stuff, those tend to keep the insulin blood sugar more level. So you're not getting inflammatory spikes. So more muscle activity, less fat activity. Next thing then beyond, you know, diet and exercise and lifestyle, actually sleep. Very important, and a lot of people that have traumatic brain injuries, long COVID, etc., don't sleep well. So sleep might be something you have to work with somebody on, but sleep is another factor. It's one of the hygienic factors. The next thing would be basic things, and there's a lot of fats involved. Now you probably have heard your brain has a lot of fat in it. Well, the blood-brain barrier also relies on a lot of good fat in order for its structure to be appropriate. One grouping of fats would be antioxidants that help the fats, and that would be the vitamin E family. E like Edward. So vitamin E becomes important. Omega-3 oils, especially the omega oils generally, but omega-3 oils like you might see coming from, say, fish and certain types of sea vegetables, etc. Omega-3, very important. Phospholipids. So you might have seen, you know, phospholipids might come in things like eggs or other types of food products. You might see supplements that are like phosphatidylcholine. That's a phospholipid. There's also glycerophosphocholine or GPC. And there's other types of phospholipid type of supplements people use, especially with blood-brain barrier disruptions, et cetera. And then there's the more water-soluble type of antioxidants. So things like vitamin C, we talked about vitamin E, a fat-soluble one. Glutathione is helpful. Then there's also hormonal involvement. Now, this is something that generally you have to then work with a practitioner on because you can't sort of sit back and say, well, owner, you know, guess how your hormones are doing. But in the world of reproductive hormones, so you're looking at the testosterone family, the estrogen family and progesterone. And relatives, the balance between progesterone and estrogen becomes very important for blood-brain barrier health and healing. The androgens, so it's a testosterone family, DHEA, androstenedione, all those guys, they become important. So if we're having people you know have either long-term damage or you know maybe a very bad case that you know is associated with mast cell disease or other things like long COVID, we may actually do blood testing or other testing to see how those reproductive hormones are going. You might say, well, how are reproductive hormones? Affecting the blood-brain barrier. They're not affecting it so much for reproductive purposes, obviously, but in the brain, those hormones have other jobs that they do. And again, it's about balance. It's not about one is better than the other. So tends to be in inflammatory states, male or female, you will get a rise in estrogen and the progesterone may not be adequate and the testosterone may not be adequate. So you have to look at them as a, as a group or a family. So there's a hormonal component as well. You can do external type of therapies or other type of therapies. that may be helpful. Hyperbaric oxygen certainly is one that's used quite a bit in the traumatic brain injury arena. Red light or photodynamic therapy, you may have even seen people with, say, like a helmet, looks like a bike helmet, but it actually has either a red light or infrared array underneath it that's used. That's used quite a bit in dermatology, but it's also now more and more used around the world in brain trauma, blood-brain barrier healing, et cetera. So red light, near-infrared, Other things such as an interesting use of an old drug called naltrexone. We use it at very low doses. Low-dose naltrexone is often used in this setting. And then once you build on the basics, so you've got, you know, diet and lifestyle and sleep, the things we talked about, then you have your basic antioxidants, glutathione, vitamin C and vitamin E, and maybe you have some good fats in there like phospholipids and maybe some omegas, et cetera. And then maybe you're doing different types of therapies, maybe some red light infrared therapy, or hyperbaric, other types of therapies going on there. Then we have to look at, as I said, what triggered the damage to start with. So if it was a trauma and you're not getting re-traumatized, that's a little simpler because the trauma can stop and we can work just full-time on, you know, getting you healed up after the trauma, which is easier said than done, but you got to work at it. If it's a chronic inflammatory problem, let's say you have a neurological autoimmunity or you have mast cell disorder or potentially you have long COVID with neurological symptoms, Those have other kind of chronic, maybe slow burn type of things going on. And those are things that you're probably going to have to work on as you go. And so people will often say, well, does it make sense to work on the blood-brain barrier when I have these other chronic problems going on? And the answer is yes, it does make sense. It's a longer process. So if you have something that's not stopped, so something that's stopped would be like a traumatic brain injury. You're not getting hit in the head anymore. You've still got a lot of work to do there, but you're not getting hit in the head anymore. If you have long COVID or you have mast cell disorders or you have autoimmunity, especially neurological autoimmunity, you have to be working on those as well as healing the blood-brain barrier. And you have to kind of do them concurrent. That's what's important in that respect. So I hope this answered the question behind the blood-brain barrier and generally how do we approach trying to heal it up, et cetera. And remember that it starts with diet and lifestyle type interventions. And then we go to nutrient types of therapies that may Fats, maybe antioxidants, et cetera. And then we kind of build on top of that with maybe internal or external therapies such as low-dose naltrexone and hyperbaric oxygen, red light, near-infrared, many, many other types of therapies that may go on there. And then we may look at other contributors such as hormonal balance and a number of other things as we go. And then if we still have the cause of the blood-brain barrier disruption, such as mast cell disorders, long COVID, autoimmunity, et cetera, we have to continually work on those while we work on repairing the blood-brain barrier. I'm Dr. A. Thank you guys for listening. We're going to link some other videos of interest here, and I'll see you all on the next video we do. Thank you.