Your Fragile Brain: How to Measure your Brain Voltage & Protect Yourself from Trauma, Concussions, and Dementia

Welcome to the Peptides and Longevity Podcast, redefining aging and transforming health. Each week, Dr. Kent Holtorf will dive into groundbreaking science, innovative therapies, and the future of health and longevity alongside visionary physicians and experts. We'll explore how peptides, cutting-edge medicine, and lifestyle strategies can redefine the way we age. Get ready to transform your health, optimize your vitality, and unlock the secrets to to a longer, healthier life. Let's get started.

Hello, it's Dr. Ken Holtorf with another episode. Today we have a great interview for me, Jim Prather. He's going to be talking about objective measures of brain function for health and performance. Thanks for coming on, Jim.

You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. And, and so, you know, I've been looking for a device. He's going to be talking about the Wavi. And we'll get, we'll get into that. It measures essentially your, your brain, your brain function. And it looked for a number of years and at conferences, hey, we need to get this and evaluating different systems and nothing I really liked. And then I kept hearing good things about Wavi, but I had never seen them. And then kind of a good a good friend of mine, Doc, said, oh, we're using— oh my God, this thing is great. And so they came and actually did a demo the other day, and I hadn't slept, and so my brain was not as— I was a little disappointed. But it shows how sleep is so important. But, and really looking forward to incorporating it in our practice with a— from everything, you know, we generally treat very sick patients who have tons of cognitive dysfunction and almost dementia. So looking forward to see how that is and also showing improvement and then also bringing in the healthy patients that, you know, maybe they have Alzheimer's in their family or— and they're worried and you can make a difference. And when you see before and after and they have beautiful color, basically their whole software that will analyze all this complex, you know, you see all these brainwaves everywhere and make it very understandable. Very, I think, compelling for the patient, where you show, hey, your brain is not where it should be, and then you get them better. They're freaking happy with you, and they're going to tell people about it. But just quick little bio on Jim. He brings over 30 years of executive and financial experience from the information technology, media, and consumer electronics industry, uh, to the Wavi team. From beginning of Wavi and one of the original investors, now to the role of president of Wavi Medical and CFO. He's working with doctors and researchers to ensure that the Wavi hardware and software is effective and practical in improving patient outcomes. Uh, his work involves identifying individuals and groups interested in the brain journey from athletes, including US Olympians, to leading brain researchers, cardiologists, concussion experts. So I just interviewed last night, I forgot to hit record. And the integrative health practitioners, biohackers. I think this is just a great device for almost every field because we don't have a measure of brain before and after. And it's, it's, you know, it's the brain. It controls everything. His deep understanding of the need to work collaboratively across the brain ecosystem provides these diverse groups the ability to change the face of brain care. And I think the field, like, medicine is changing, really focusing on the brain. You think they would have focused on the brain years, you know, decades ago, but it seems like they're finally getting around to it.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's pretty interesting. It's evolving, I think, even with people locked down and, you know, depression, anxiety, and post-COVID type stuff coming up. It's, uh, brain fog is now actually a term everybody's using. And there's a lot of different things that are bringing it to light. So it's pretty exciting.

Yeah. I mean, it's— everyone has brain issues, you know, it's everyone from the athlete that has multiple concussions and, and, and even, you know, you look at all these sports where you don't think that many, like soccer or even, you know, people who skateboard And it's just that chronic, you don't even have to have like a big auto accident or, you know, but, and everybody has issues, but nice thing is there's ways to improve it and you can show them before and after. Just, this is a random question, but would you let your kid play football?

Well, I'm in Texas, so it's kind of a national—

Yeah. Friday night lights.

You know, I, I probably would. I might keep him in flag football for the first, until he's, you know, in his middle school. And I would definitely monitor his brain health. We, we utilize Wavi as part of a baselining routine with a number of sports, including stuff that, you know, you had no— I had no clue had so many concussions, like women's volleyball. I mean, that's huge. Cheerleading is one of the worst ones. So you kind of look through it. So there's no reason why anybody shouldn't just have or avail themselves of a baseline scan for their kids or for their student athletes.

Oh, I, you know what, I'm just thinking, I didn't think about that. Are any professional football teams using this or—

So, so the professionals are interesting because there's some conflicts obviously. And yeah, they don't want to really know, you know, we, we are starting to work with retired NFL players, which is kind of exciting. And they do want to know at that point, they want to understand the damage done and what they can do about it. We're obviously just a measurement device where we're agnostic from the interventions that doctors do. But it gives a great way, as you said, kind of a pre-post measurement on interventions.

So yeah, I mean, you, you need to know because it's not very powerful. Oh, the person says they're— they can think better, you know. It's like, how do you put that in a research study, right?

And, and we get that all the time. Well, I don't— what are you going to see though? I don't know if I have a brain, you know. And is this a It's not a measurement of intelligence. It's not a measurement— it's a measurement of brain activity, of brain power, of brain speed. Those are the kind of measurements we do using an electroencephalogram, an EEG. We just made it easier to do it, and then we've taken all that very complex data and made those measurements easy to understand for, you know, for doctors of all sorts and clinicians too.

Yeah, and in fact, we didn't have much time to do the demo, but he's like 'Are you ADD and do you sleep?' And I'm like, 'Oh my God, I'm the most ADD person I've ever met.' And I hadn't slept, like, I slept like 3 hours, and the night before, like, 7 PowerPoints due this week. And so it hit it right off the bat with just a brief scan, you know. Yeah.

And it's, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that. We, we kind of started the company with this concept, and this is like 13, 14 years ago, of How do you put objective measurements around the brain, the aging brain in particular? All of us have parents, you know, that are either, you know, someone or you're one person removed from someone that's dealing with dementia or pre-Alzheimer's symptoms.

It's devastating.

Brutal, especially on the caregivers. But you know, if there's a way that you could track that, if there's a way that you could see, you know, normal digression, or if, you know, all of a sudden it seems to fall off a cliff, you, you know, it's something you need to do something about. But those kind of measurements are not necessarily easy to collect or easy to display or communicate. And that's where we started the company. Let's create measurements around that. Because we got— we're based out of Boulder, Colorado, and we're tied into the University of Colorado. We got pulled into a really cool study related to concussion. So working 4 years with the football team and the women's soccer team there, we measured baseline and postseason on every athlete, and then measured 24-48 hours after concussion, and then on the return to play. And we saw amazing things related to that. So the, the aging brain, the injured brain, those are two of the big areas that we feel like we're a great measurement tool for doctors to utilize.

Wow. And when you see an acute concussion, What do you generally see, low voltage in that area or? Correct.

That's absolutely right. So in general, we had 100% correlation in our study with the combination of a drop in voltage and the reaction time measurement that we have. And those two together correlated 100% with what the docs were saying. You know, the interesting thing was it's not so much getting the kid off the field. It's, it's more 5 days, 10 days later, it's a very difficult—

when to put them back.

That's exactly right. Return to play, return to learn. And by then they might have performance back up to where they were beforehand. But what we saw in about 36% of the time is that their measurements, their measurements related to brain speed and voltage and these things that we're doing objectively had not come back to their baseline scores. And that's, that's scary.

And especially, I think probably intelligent people can kind of compensate. And so people don't notice.

That's right. Or you can just game the system. Put me back in, coach. You know, I feel fine.

Like, yeah, you know, yeah, you don't want to be wimpy, right? No.

And it's unfortunate, but we do know that the concussed brain, if it's damaged again, it's in general a much worse injury to the brain.

So when you re-damage a damaged area, it's not good. Significantly worse then.

Yep. And, you know, CTE and all the discussions of that, we find that the majority of those are happening— those types of brains are happening with the people that are, you know, the repetitive damage. It's, you know, a lot of times not even noticed.

Can you explain CTE for everyone?

Yeah. So, you know, we all know what a concussion is. You get hit, you know, and whether it's a car accident, a skateboard accident, or football or whatever the sport or activity, and there's usually shearing of brain, of the brain, because it's this nice, you know, Jello type thing inside of the skull that shifts around. It's built that way and it's built to take some, some kind of hits, but not the big ones. And so that shearing occurs. That's, generally has issues with the brain and the functioning of it after that, and that's generally a concussion. Now, I'm saying general because there are all sorts, and I'm not a doctor, I'm not going to claim to be one, but we know that those are the types of, of issues that happen. If it happens repetitively over periods of time in a lifetime of sports, then that's what is generally, again, causes the damage that's related to these players or Or more in the old days, the boxers, it was, you know, especially with boxers, cause they were getting hit all the time.

Punch drunk or whatever you say.

And that's generally what was causing the CTE later on. There's a lot of behavioral issues, loss of memory damage. It's devastating.

It's devastating. Rages, right? And things like that.

Well, and imagine the frustration of that player, that ex-player that's suffering through those. They're used to being performing at such a high level. And then all of a sudden you go from, you know, that great family of a brotherhood or sisterhood on your team to nothing. So you've got these depression issues. If you don't keep working out the way you were, you're going to have issues related to the physiology of your body. And there is just an impact on the brain because of all that. Yeah.

And I know a number of doctors that treat, you know, professional football players, professional athletes, and You know, they're telling me a number of them like can't find their way home. And even ones that are playing, like they're very impaired.

Yeah. They're still going. I think the issue there is, you know, there's things that can be done still. It's even, you know, maybe not very, very late stage, but early stage or while they're playing sports, there's things that you can do to retain that plasticity of the brain and the ability to recreate and regenerate the cells there.

Yeah. And, you know, I give lectures on, you know, and, and, you know, a lot of nutrients work, a lot of things work. But even with just the peptides, like, amazing studies on thymosin beta-4, TB4 frag actually, because it gets in the blood-brain barrier, it's much smaller. And BPC not only prevents damage, but it like dramatically speeds the recovery back to normal. And they, I mean, every, I think every football player should be on this stuff, you know?

And that's again, you know, since we're just the measurement device, the nice thing that we can do though in those situations is not just to say, well, how do you feel? I feel great. No, no, no. Here's the measurement before, here's the measurement after. We're seeing brain speed, brain voltage, reaction time, all these different measurements and markers. Improve. Your brain is better now. I can prove— and that is so helpful, not just for the doctor trying to figure out what's the right mixture or concoction to help that one, but also for the patient to be able to say, well, dang, this is better. I'm— I am getting and moving in the right direction with this. Yeah.

And that's what I was, you know, thinking when you guys came out. I'm like, okay, this is perfect. I want to start a number of studies and, and show the effects of— and we have what's called, you know, Cerebropep, it's like cerebro— my son— brain peptides. And even my stepson's like, like, he was kind of squirrely. I don't know, he probably won't watch this, so— and it's like, what's wrong with them? And we gave him the Cerebropep. It's like basically brain neuropeptides. And his brothers are like, oh my God, he's a new person, he's so calm. And then he's bragging about his memory and saying people are commenting about his memory, how great it is. And I'm like, I don't— all I know, you're much easier to deal with, you know.

Yeah, very cool. That's great. And we, we're involved. It's a research-level device, so we're involved in a lot of research. We've got a couple of NIH grant research, research projects, one around the study of pain— what does the brain look like that's in pain? Um, yeah, another one.

Hey, if I'm happy to do a bunch of studies, will you guys fund any?

Yeah, actually, they're That— those are funded by the government, which is really wonderful. They see the need for that. They, they're looking for something that they can put into an emergency room to say, okay, that guy, he really don't need those opioids. That's, that's— you're just a—

yeah, just looking at the studies that have already been done, I can't believe, you know, it's like with the peptides, that's what everyone says. Like when I give lectures, like, how can you have hundreds of studies? I've never heard about it, you know.

Great question.

Yeah.

So it's nice.

Well, what got you into the brain in particular, or was it the, was it the, the sophistication of the software hardware that really attracted you to this?

Or, yeah, I mean, first and foremost, as I said, I'm, my wife, her family has a history of Parkinson's and, and has a grandmother that passed away with Alzheimer's. My mother suffers from dementia. I've had, I've had 4 concussions. I did play football, so I do know what that's like. Or I should say, I don't remember, but people tell me about it.

People tell me.

That's right. So I think, you know, on the injured and the ill brain, if you don't have someone you're directly related to, you're probably just a step away from someone that is. And so it did interest us when Dr. Oakley approached me. He was my, my friend from college, and he said, you know, hey, we're going to start this company up. I've You know, we, we helped fund up that original effort. And then as I said, 6 years ago, he, he sucked me into his vortex and I've been working with him since to bring it out to public.

So that's, that's good. When you ever invest with a friend, it's like, I've never had that work because you don't do due diligence.

Like, oh, okay.

You know, that's awesome.

We've had quite the time.

And I would think, I don't know, I'm trying to think of like a study, whatever, like people, I think they're more scared of dementia than they are death.

Correct. Well, you know, they're more—

makes sense.

They're definitely more scared of brain and brain issues than heart issues now. So everybody thinks, well, I'll just get a stent or I'll get a valve replacement.

Yeah.

And like you said, there's so much research, so much science around the heart and what, you know, improving that. But when it comes to the brain, I tell people, you know, it's like deep space or the bottom of the ocean. It's just a really very cool, very perplexing, very hard to understand organ of the body. And it's the most important one.

Yeah. And you look at the medications we have, I mean, they're, I mean, they maybe slow the rate of decline a little bit, but they're just so basic compared to everything else, you know?

Yeah.

Again, it's crazy.

I'm not gonna judge on the pharmaceuticals out there. What I do know is that exercise and sleep and, you know, a community around you, things like those, plus things, you know, that are natural can, can good diet, those kind of things can help the brain immensely.

God, I hate that. I choose the pill that makes the body thinks it's exercising and thinks it's fasting. But this seems like great from everyone from the integrative practitioner. I'm just picturing it in our practice to so many different fields. Like what, what can the Wavi show, show people?

Yeah, great question. The key thing is understanding behind the scenes, it is an EEG device. It is doing what EEGs have done for literally 100 years. We're collecting brain waves. We're assessing those. We do a specific type of EEG called an evoked potential. So we'll have headsets on. You're going to hear a series of beeps. It's going to— you're going to react differently when you hear an odd tone and you're clicking the mouse button than when you hear a common tone. So do do do do do do do do do, on that odd tone, your brain reacts differently. And we're measuring at that point brain speed, voltage, and a physical reaction time. Again, this has been around since the '60s. It's— this is not new technology. It's just not been packaged well.

That's where I find the best literature is old research that people haven't paid attention to.

And everybody knows about it, but, you know, you've— we've done all these different new kinds of scans and What we needed to do and what we did is we went back and looked at the old stuff and said, well, wait a minute, and not old, and it's just, you know, a lot of research behind it and baked those algorithms, put that kind of quick artifacting in on the data to make sure it's clean, the algorithms to make the data look useful and a nice report that a doctor could use, even a report that can look very good for a customer or a patient that they can go through with them.

Yeah. And they're really nice. They're in color, you know, hey, if you have red and the patient sees it, or in this case, blue is not good, but color, it's motivating.

You know, it really is. And you can understand it for once, you know, everybody likes to get the scan. It's kind of fun to get it. We worked with the founder of Crocs and his group to come up with a nice material and We worked with the guys out of Italy, Momo Design, on the design of the headset. That's what we have our FDA clearance on, and it's—

it looks pretty cool. It reminds me of like Star Trek or something.

Yeah, yeah, you won't— you won't wear it too much in public, but you wouldn't mind putting on to get a brain scan.

Yeah, yeah, it's not bad. And, uh, well, actually a little rhetorical, but you know, how can improve outcomes?

What Yeah, again, I can't, I can't prove anything. What I can do is show a change in measurement that's objectively obtained from the brain. What that helps you do as a doc or clinician is to say, all right, instead of just asking the one question which we all ask is, well, how do you feel? Now you can put some measurements with that. So I might feel differently from one day to the next, but my brain hasn't changed. I just got a good night's sleep or maybe I had my cup of coffee in the morning. But to have something that's reproducible and can show that pre-post measurement objectively, it's wonderful.

And I think it's kind of like people where you go to your HMO doctor, whatever, and I'm not a fan of statins because when you really dig down in literature, they're shown to, you know, it takes 99 people to benefit one. It has, you know, risk of dementia and diabetes. But everyone just wants to see that cholesterol level. And they tell their friends, what's your cholesterol? Well, my cholesterol is better. So now you change that to you got an objective brain measure, and people are like, oh my God, my brain's this. Well, what's your brain? Now I'm better. Like, that's just so fulfilling, even more than the cholesterol. And that's what people never go off their statin because they want— they freak if their cholesterol number goes up. And I can see the same thing happening with, you know, the brain number. Hey, you haven't been doing this, you haven't been doing that, your brain's a little slower. Like, oh my God, you know, and very motivating, which is the hardest thing to do is motivate a patient, right?

Yeah, that, that, and the other side is keeping them compliant. So compliance of the patient to your regime, if they can see that improvement, they're much more likely to say, oh, hang on, I am making success, I am improving, and here's a great measurement. Okay, I'm going to stay on that diet, exercise.

No other doctor has shown them this, and they are just, oh my God, my brain's better. They're going to be telling the world, you know.

Yeah, people do, people do talk about it. It's always interesting to do husband and wives because there's sometimes some competition in there. We don't like to be involved in that, but—

oh my gosh, if she was better, I'd be like, okay, I'm going to exercise for the— I should exercise religiously every 4 months for 8 minutes, but I'll maybe double it or something. But so it works through to EEG evoke potential. So what, like, what basically— that's gone back many, many years. Uh, it's kind of in the standard looking for seizures. And yeah, it's a—

the kind of the commonplace use now of EEGs is in looking at, you know, epilepsy or seizures. Um, obviously People use it when they're under anesthesia to monitor the brain in operations. I was approached one time by a group, well, can you measure brain death? And I'm like, oh my God, you know, that we don't— that's not our place. You're going to stay with that ambulatory long-term EEG device when you're measuring those kinds of things. Again, what the research will tell you is that it's also very useful for other things. So this P300 measurement, this EEG with an evoked response, that's extremely useful for measurement as it relates to things like brain deterioration, mild cognitive impairment, for the injured brain, for rehabbing the brain. So stroke patient, how do I know if I'm improving that brain if I'm, you know, a neurophysiologist or I'm a physiatrist trying to get improvement in the brain? Well, you need a measurement device to do that, and that's what we do. So it is an EEG. You can do, you know, see the brain waves like you would with a common EEG or a standard EEG out there. But what we like to do is we say, oh, it's more of a sweet spot of this cost-benefit that we're doing to make it an easy-to-run, quick measurement that gives you a lot of good information on the brain to use in general health and into some of these other modalities and these other ailments that we're talking about.

Now, let's say, do you With brain speed, is it overall, or do you see some people like with ADD or whatever, but whatever it may be, or even stroke, one part slow and the other part's fast and asymmetrical, or—

Those are great questions. Yes, yes, and yes. Again, what does that mean is really, again, we put that back on the doctor. No EEG is a diagnostic device. It doesn't do diagnosis. That's a doctor's purview. We just like to give the doctor better information, more information, objective information around a very complex subject, whether that's the behavioral side, again, the aging brain or the injured brain. We think there's a real need for some objective measurements to go with all the other things that they're doing. So I would never ask a doctor to not do a history on the patient or not do a symptomatic type assessment. They should do that always. But let's augment that with some great measurements around brain health to go with it.

And it's kind of like what we have found with chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome. You know, docs say, oh, there's no tests for that.

But it's a good one.

We can pick it out 80% of the time, 78% of time, and how bad it is on a blood test without even talking to the patient, knowing anything by pattern recognition.

Yes.

And if you do enough tests, so you're measuring all these different areas. And I would bet if we do a bunch of Lyme patients or chronic fatigue syndrome, they're going to come up with a pattern and where it could be used as a diagnosis. I, I would, I would bet a lot of money on that.

But we're going to start a study, I think, fairly soon on fibromyalgia and, you know, chronic fatigue. Um, for that very reason. We have, you know, again, there's lots of tests, there's tests you can do. There's, you know, they, but most of those tests are trying to trigger an episode. They're trying to trigger a reaction. And so what they want to do is couple what they're currently doing with this one group and put the EEG, put the Wabi scan in there with it and see what is the brain doing.

You know, I mean, it's, it's a brain illness and you look at the people are so Like, well, people cry the first visit just because we believe them. Yeah. You know, and we show them on blood tests, but it's another way. Like, you show them their brain scan, for lack of a better word, sucks. You know, see, I'm sick. And they, a lot of, some will say, you know, they've been to, when we did a study 15 years ago and published it, they saw on average 7.2 physicians for any improvement. Now it's probably 15. And the doctors just treat them like crap, say it's psychological, you don't have this, but you show 'You got brain dysfunction,' you know, they're like, 'Look, Harold, I told you,' you know. And I, I think it's, it's very empowering work because they just feel— they like, 'I'd rather have cancer,' you know.

Yeah, you know, the recognition of issues I think is, is huge for anybody, whether that's, you know, a behavioral mental health issue or it's like you're saying, a neurological disease that doesn't show up because my finger falls off. It's in your system and you're, you're feeling the repercussions of it. That's— those are great, great areas of study.

Yeah, no, I'm excited to, to, to bring it in. And so it's— the EEG's been around a long time. What did you guys do? And I know it's very technical, but in a broad sense, how did you make it different?

So it's like any disruptive technology, we have taken something existing. EEGs again have been around for years. So has this evoked potential measurement. And we said, let's make it easy to conduct the scan. We can literally get someone in 2 to 3 hours trained up, a med tech person, you know, that's conscientious, get them trained up and ready to go and running scans. So it's easy to conduct the scan. EEGs don't need— you don't need a nurse practitioner.

You don't need a particular licensed person. It's just MAs, whoever, front desk can even do it, right?

Yep, I can even do them. So, you know, and the thought behind that was, all right, EEGs are notoriously sensitive because you're literally measuring electricity at the cortical level. And so understanding that data and then artifacting it, in other words, kicking out the bad stuff and just using good data. So we automatically artifact the data.

That seems huge.

It is huge, and, and it also gives you a consistent look because that's all automated. So you get the same artifacting from scan to scan. You're getting a nice consistent read on your patients and between measurements for a specific patient. And then finally, being able to take that really complex data and simplify it in the form of, you know, some of these reports that we provide. So we have a one-page, nice, beautiful looking report, kind of gives you a nice target range. So there's an age-related target range I don't want to be compared to one of my, you know, University of Colorado athletes. Those guys' brains are awesome. Or someone in the military that's been, you know, in one of these special ops teams. They're just— it's phenomenal what some of these brains can do. But I want to be compared to people my age. I want to see that level.

So I want to be compared to the fat, lazy, non-exercising man.

Yeah, we haven't got that selection yet. So when we do, we'll let you know.

I want my category.

Yeah. And then, you know, the, the final thing is really making it so that it's quick and, and affordable. I mean, right up front, we are not— we're trying to disrupt on the pricing of the way we do things too. We keep it relatively inexpensive so that a doctor can run many scans just like they would do, you know, many blood tests or check your blood pressure quite often. We think that the brain is is as important as an organ as your heart.

I can see it doing on every patient comes in, you know. I don't see a person that it doesn't make sense with.

Yeah, and age as well, you know. Wouldn't it be great to have every preteen measured before they started, you know, middle school, and then every other year do a scan just so you could say, all right, if something happens—

yeah, all of a sudden they get whacked in the head and you can see. And it was argument like, you know, do, say, you know, just get blood tests on every young person. But, you know, no one's going to do that. But the brain scan makes sense. And where you can see, let your kid play football, hey, here's the deal, if this drops, then you're out until it's better.

Yeah, I mean, it's stunning when you think about 20 years ago and where we are today with defibrillators in all these stadiums and these training offices, because people go, oh, hang on, people could have heart attacks. These kids, 18-year-olds, 16- year-old kids could still have a heart attack. And there was a lot of effort to get something out there to help, you know, the heart. Well, you know, the brain is as important as the heart. So I think, you know, at some point it's, it's going to be the norm that people within their annual wellness— hey, get your blood test, get your blood pressure looked at, get your eyes checked, and get a Wavi scan, get a brain scan.

Does it show— like, I don't even know, I was just thinking Addicts' brains versus normal?

That's a good one. Yeah, we— that's one of the NIH studies that we're involved in right now. We started it in the fall of, of last year, even with COVID going, and the government has funded up the state, uh, a Phase 1 study to look at the addicts' brains, opioids in particular. We're doing a study on entry into a rehab facility, kind of 30 days, 90 days, 6 months later for those individuals to say, what does the addicted brain look like? And, you know, we've already seen some pretty interesting things from some of these.

I can imagine. Like, yeah, like the pleasure center, you know, and all these things.

And well, yeah, think about this. It's something I think to the tune of 80%, 90% relapse rates. And if you, you know, the impact on society, on families is just brutal and much less the individual. Well, if we could say, all right, we actually looked at these brains and were able to see certain aspects of a healed brain versus one that relapsed. And then let's know who to—

you know, hey, look, you're not done.

Um, yeah, 15 more.

That's safe.

Yep, absolutely.

That's my brother, 30 rehabs. You know, it could say, do the brain scan, forget it.

You know, it's, it's pretty cool. So, you know, they may not know. They may say, well, it's 30 days and I've done this twice before, and all right, I'm out. But if they could say, keep you 2 more weeks and we can get you this much further along, and much more likely that they won't have relapse.

You can't fake it.

That's right, it's objective.

It's not, you know, I, I have to confess, I'm a little pissed at you now. I'm gonna have to do a deep dive into this because this is damn interesting, but I don't have the damn time. But I, I just, I'm ready to, like, after we end, I'm gonna start looking deeper into this because I can just see it from a clinical standpoint being so valuable and just a key piece of information for all these patients.

That's exactly right. That's why we created it. We, we, we have a real, you know, open concept of what we want to do in the, on the, on the backside of all this. Cause we've talked today, you know, most clinical, what it does, the research, it's all super interesting, but in the end, What we feel is that the data is going to help us do incredible things.

So I'm just thinking, you know, we can even just do a small, you know, studies on the peptides before and after.

It's beautiful.

And yeah, you do a study, people said less brain fog, you know, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, they don't even get confused on what's what. Now you have numbers, you know.

That's right. And, you know, AI, artificial intelligence, the deep learning modules, we're already using that on the data and we're seeing incredible stuff. So the grants I was talking about and some of these other studies, we are starting to put those through these different models and seeing some stuff that we couldn't have been able to process with that level of data beforehand. The correlations are wonderful. It is.

It's kind of like, you know, If you get an EEG from the old day, it's just so like, what do we do with this, you know?

Yeah, yeah, all the ticker tape and all the lines going across. I mean, what the heck?

Yeah, I think that's kind of the way the world is. It's like, I remember, you know, like basically writing research papers for computers. You go to the UCLA or Scripps, you know, medical library, go find the damn journal if it's there, go copy it, you know, and so slow. It was who could you know, basically go find that information. Now it's information overload. It's who can filter it.

That's right. And filter in a way that's useful, you know, absolutely the case. So we, you know, we're working with some good companies and some good, you know, some good institutions on doing just that. But we'd love to see, you know, a lot of the problem with research is the data gathering side. So if we could start providing longitudinal data on brains, you know, we can start figuring out, okay, 20 years before we've been measuring, they have Alzheimer's here. What was going on here? Because that's where you could do something that—

in particular, that's where you can make a difference.

Exactly right. Yep.

Wow, I totally agree. This exciting stuff. Do you have any, like, cases that you've heard with, like, you know, what are some things that have really helped? I know you're not the treatment side, but You hear things. Oh yeah.

A lot. Yeah. So there is the obvious.

Okay?

You know, if I told you that if you went and walked a mile or two every day that you would improve your brain, first of all, you'd probably throw something at me if you didn't be, you weren't doing that. But second of all, it's actually true.

But you do feel better.

You do feel better and you will be better.

When you work, here's the thing. I work out. I'm going every day. And the next day I'm like, I'll go tomorrow.

I know. And listen, I, I get it. I've, I struggle with the same stuff. So it's— but if you, if you can literally see that you're, you know, the things you're worried about are improving, then it's a little bit motivating. It's motivating. That's exactly right. But yeah, we've seen everything from different types of exercise, different nutraceuticals, you know, what happens when you really do nourish the brain the correct way. You know, hydration, drink water, you know, drink, you know, that's obviously going to help the brain as well. Sleep, lowering stress, whether that's through mindfulness techniques and the like.

Um, so that it even scared me was my sleep and the whole lack of sleep. And, you know, I read also that you really can't make up your sleep, you know? And so It made me go to bed early last night.

There you go.

Okay.

And again, it'd be fun to do that next measurement on you and say, all right, well, you know, here's where you were, Dr. Altov, here's where you are now. And I think it would maybe motivate you to go to bed earlier again. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not judging. But I do know with all these things, there's an impact on the brain, some more so than others, some that are much more geared towards, let's say, an ill brain versus an injured brain. And as we start mixing that big matrix of interventions and brain health, I think we're going to have some really nice solutions for people going forward.

And just determining what treatments work, you know?

Yeah.

It's so hard to just say, well, how do you feel? Doing this better? You know? Yeah. It's just so much more objective. Yeah. And, and I mean, I, I'm picturing so many ways to incorporate it into the practice. Like, How do you see doctors and healthcare providers use this?

Yeah, again, my hope and wish is that it's something they would use annually on every patient. What the heck, you know, run the scan, get the data, and then, you know, if things are normal and, you know, tapering at the right levels and doing the right things, then fine, so be it, you know, go and do more. But if it drops off, if you're able to see a vast improvement, those are things we want to start understanding better so we can share share and build out this, you know, ecosystem of folks trying to obviously improve everybody's brain journey.

So now, is there a time frame where it's like, okay, you start a particular treatment, we want to see if this works? Um, is there a minimum time, or do you see the immediate improvement with things, or—

depends on what it is, right? We do know that the brain is always regenerating itself, the cells in it. And, and so the injured brain is going to look a little bit different if you're working with someone that had a stroke patient versus someone in, let's say, a car accident that had a TBI. We do know that illnesses, neurological illnesses, have different effect as they put them through interventions. You know, how well— you even mentioned it— how well those penetrate the blood-brain barrier are going to have an impact on the time So really we work with the clinicians. They're the smart ones. We're going to say, all right, well, what do you think would be an impact? Would it be a week, 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years? Let's start gathering data at the segments that you think are meaningful so we can see the efficacy of what you're working on.

And this is just a random question. We treat— we don't see a ton, but ALS patients come in.

Oh God.

And so many of them are jogging now, right? And, you know, last one we had diagnosed ALS with 3 different neurologists, in a wheelchair, totally fine now. He goes back to the neurologist and they're, you know, they think— the patient thinks the neurologist is going to be excited. They're like, "Must have been a misdiagnosis," or, you know, "Oh, I'm sure whatever treatment he had didn't do anything with it." So it's a miracle, you know, and we expect to get these patients better. Do you have any idea what the ALS patient brain looks like?

Um, not offhand. I, we've, I've seen actually, I, it's a random question, but yeah. Yeah. No, no. We've, we've actually seen the measurements around the ALS brain. I just, I can't, I couldn't talk to it offhand. I could pull our physiatrist, our doctor CMO into that. And he's—

I'm just curious. I see another one this week, you know, so I gotta get your machine in and Right.

Well, that's what I'm saying. Capture the data, capture the miracle, and put the objective data around it. That's awesome.

Yeah. How long does it take to get, get onboarded with this?

Probably, if you've got a good MA, someone that we can train, literally we can have them up and running in 3 hours.

Okay. I like that. I like that. And any, any new, new things you guys are working on?

We kind of talked about the research stuff. There is— we do have a capability we added recently because we've started getting involved with the biohacker crowd, which is kind of interesting. So we, we have added, and, you know, people get that with the Wavi device, ear clips that will also do a PPG or a heart rate variability measurement. So it's kind of nice. A lot of docs already have devices that do, you know, ANS type measurements.

We had one, but it never worked and we could never— like, they were in Europe and we've spent a ton of money on it.

Now I'm like, um, I'm just the brain guy. So the ours we know works, you know. So there's, there's a couple little tweaks to this.

That's, that's a nice little add-on, actually.

Oh, it is, it is. And so you can run an HRV measurement as well. We've also— we're working on a couple of things to keep the neurologist happy. So we've got a couple of export capabilities that they can actually take our data and then they can put into their viewers, which is really nice for them. But those are the kind of things that we're working on.

And then does the neurologist feel threatened?

You know, the ones that— we had some great neurologists that we're working with, and a lot of times you just have to educate them on what you're doing. And once they see it, they generally like it.

Immediately they poo-poo everything.

Basically, you know, I'm not going to be the judgment guy. I can say it, but we have a couple that are just fabulous. I mean, and they have really embraced it. They understand that, like I said, it's not the traditional EEG that you run on, you know, for spikes and spindles looking at epilepsy and seizures. Run the longer-term one. But if you want a really good quick view of the brain, you want a nice assessment with some really good information out of the back end, You know, our scan takes 4 minutes. It's literally an EEG for 4 minutes. It's fast.

That's huge. Because how long is a standard EEG? Like—

Well, it depends, but you know, a lot of them can take hours. They literally want you to fall asleep. They want you to experience a seizure. In some cases, you're wearing the devices. That's, that's really not our sweet spot. We want quick, easy, and we want to get information back instantaneously to the doctors and the clinicians.

Which, which goes to volume. Now you can do it on so many patients because Patients aren't going to wait an hour and do a test and have that thing on their head for—

No, and we like to say you're not going to have a bad hair day after it either because they're saline.

Yeah, and it's just saline. It's not goop.

It's not goop. Yeah, yeah, goop is not fun. People don't get happy with the EEG after having goop on their heads.

Yeah, because then they gotta go to work or something, you know.

They don't go to work. Yeah, we find that our football players and our athletes are some of the pickier people about their hair. So it's—

Oh, isn't it funny?

You want to keep them happy.

It's like the heroin addicts in the ER, so scared to get a needle stick, you know. But anything else you want to say about—

No, you know, we, like I said, we love working with the docs, especially the ones that have, you know, people that obviously care for their patients. This is a great way to augment what they're currently doing for them. The aging patient, I'm always stunned at how much, as we all grow older and that population gets bigger and bigger, and lives longer and longer. We want to do things to extend that life in a healthy way. And the brain is, is one of the key components of that. So we love working with those kinds of people, but it's also really fun to work with doctors that have some research ideas and just haven't really been able to apply them. We like working with them because those are great ideas that other people should know about. And, and we do that all the time.

Yeah. Because, you know, living longer without a the functioning brain, who wants it?

Yeah. And you know, I feel for the caregivers obviously the most because the ones that are most impacted.

Yeah. In fact, I was reading a study the other day, the stress levels of like Alzheimer's caregivers is just, and they don't even know who you are.

And it's just, it's tough.

It's very tough.

We've talked to a lot of those folks and it is something that if we can help avoid or help heal or help improve those, those people and those outcomes related to the intervention, let's do it.

Hey, you're doing great work, and I, I can see this making so many breakthroughs, allowing so many breakthroughs of treatments. Because you look at the studies where, oh, the patients were, you know, seem better functioning, whatever, it's kind of so vague. Now you've got hard objective numbers.

I mean, that's That's right.

That's awesome. So I'm looking forward to getting it and looking forward to— I could see it being a cornerstone of so many aspects of our treatment.

Yeah. Well, we appreciate what you're doing. I think again, there's all these things we're doing to improve our body and we just got to believe that the other side of that is we're improving your brain at the same time. So let's help you measure it and drive that thing the next step.

Yeah, it's like telling doctors, well, don't do labs. You know, that's what we've been doing with the brain is no brain lab, you know.

Well, or the options are extremely expensive.

So, but yeah, we never get it because it's just, yeah, okay, you got $4,000 and it probably won't show anything because it's just basically anatomy, not function. Yeah.

Yep. Absolutely right.

Hey, cool stuff. Thank you.

I appreciate it. Appreciate the time.

Yeah, this has been very interesting and exciting. And I'm just thinking of so many things to want to check out. And so I'll be calling you.

Okay. Thanks. I really appreciate it. Appreciate what you're doing.

Thanks so much.

Okay. Take care. Thanks for joining us on the Peptides and Longevity Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners passionate about optimizing their health. For more insights, resources, and updates, visit our website at www.wholetorfmed.com. Together, let's embrace a future of health and vitality. Until next time, stay inspired and keep thriving.