Reverse Alzheimer's: A Toolkit to Improve Your Cognition, with Dr. Heather Sandison

When we start to stack these negative lifestyle choices on top of each other, it manifests as dementia. Now we can also go in the other direction and we can stack lifestyle interventions in a positive way.

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And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

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Hello and welcome back to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo. This is my host, Ed Levitan. And I'm so excited to be interviewing our guest today. She's a colleague and a friend of mine. It's Dr. Heather Sandison. She is a distinguished naturopathic doctor. She's devoted her career to providing compassionate care and innovated solutions to those affected. Affected by dementia. She's renowned for her pioneering work. She's integrated groundbreaking holistic and multimodal interventions that seamlessly create clinical, residential, research and educational platforms. And it goes all together. She has been relentlessly dedicated to reversing Alzheimer's and actually has a book coming out. So her book launches on June 11. It is reversing Alzheimer's, the new toolkit to improve cognition and protect brain health. And so we're going to talk about that today because this is her zone of excellence. And Heather, welcome. Welcome to the show. I'm so excited. We're both excited, but since you and I are good friends, I'm like, so excited to have you here and be able to get the word out about how to keep yourself healthy. So welcome.

Thank you. It's always a lot of fun when I get to hang out with you guys.

I know you're excited, but this is a cool topic.

Oh, it's life changing and it's with my friend.

Double cool. Okay, fine. I mean, to really like, to think that a disease that people have thought is not able to like, is a death sentence, basically, to actually think that we can actually stop and maybe even reverse it is crazy.

I know.

So really excited for this.

And not just a death sentence, but like this long, torturous, drawn out goodbye that is like, it feels at times physically bankrupting, financially bankrupting. You are, as a family member of a loved one with dementia or Alzheimer's, you are forced into these absolutely impossible decisions of like, do I medicate with antipsychotics at times? Because my loved one Is being combative or violent, even. Even though I know it's going to make them worse, Do I put them in a care home when they asked me to never, ever do that to them, even though I don't have the capacity to care for them? There are just these impossible decisions that come up that are heartbreaking and not just for the patient. Right. Cancer, I wouldn't wish any of these complex chronic illnesses, anyone. But heart disease and cancer, they come up, but you maintain your cognitive ability to make these decisions for yourself. And when it's dementia, when it's Alzheimer's, it is just such a much more challenging situation that can really create a lot of suffering for not just the patient, but their entire ecosystem.

It really is.

I have a question that I don't think we'll have an answer, but I think I have to ask it just because I think it's maybe on people's mind. What. How would you approach.

Is this asking for a friend? This feels like an asking for a friend question. Like, hypothetically speaking, for those.

So for those of us that have friends and family that may not be aware that they have some challenges, is there any tricks of the trade that can.

So you're asking, how do you start the conversation?

Well, yeah. How do you approach it? What's a good way to approach it so that people aren't put on the defense but actually want to actually do something about it?

I'm so glad you asked. This was really important to me. In the book we have, we actually offer a conversation guide on the Marama website. And in the book, there are basically suggested language that you can use if you are chatting with a loved one who's resistant. Now, they're really, really challenging conversations to have. And absolutely, people can be put on the defensive. So what we recommend is first, you know, create an environment where they're not going to be easily distracted. So people with cognitive decline, if there's a dog running in and out and there's phones beeping and there's the sounds coming from the kitchen and pots clanging for all of us, if we're distracted, it requires mental effort to refocus. And for someone with dementia, it's even more effortful, particularly when the conversation is emotionally charged. So take the time to set it. Don't go to a restaurant where there's dishes and an ambient noise. Be in a space where they feel comfortable, maybe in their living room, in their office, wherever makes sense for that person, maybe in their garden where they're comfortable, and then come to the conversation with talking about their health generally. I think when we start to target memory, when we say it's your memory, when you put the you in there, instead of saying something like, mom, I really want to help and support you to optimize this last phase of your life, to optimize your retirement so that you get the most out of it. I think that you could feel more energetic, or I think that you could feel less frustrated. I think that you could sleep better if there's another symptom that's more objective, that's more like that she's maybe been complaining about. If you can start there and then start down this functional medicine pathway, often what we'll see is that people will be like, oh, I'm not forgetting as much. Or they might. They might sense that, okay, I feel better, I'm less inflamed, I'm not as achy. And that that's a way to get them more comfort, generally, because the side effects of this approach are that people are in less pain. They get off that daily ibuprofen, they get off the antihypertensives, they get off the antidepressants, they get off the metformin. And what we see is generally better health. So that can be a way to sort of attract them. That being said, there are a lot of people who just, you know, they come to the conclusion, my mom is not going to do this either. She's too progressed, and I can't. It's so much effort and emotional intensity to wrangle her. I can't become a martyr to this. And that's okay. I think then the next step is to say, okay, what about me? How do I do this so that I don't go down the same path in 10 or 20 years? How do I make sure that my kids don't end up in the position I'm in right now? And I take full responsibility for my health. If my mom isn't open to doing.

This, what's the origin of this whole belief system that there's nothing you can do to treat Alzheimer's? What's that about, Heather?

So there's this phenomenal book that much more eloquently, in a lot of depth, goes into how not to Study a Disease, the Story of Alzheimer's. That's the name of the book, how not to Study a Disease. And it's by a gentleman named Carl Harup, who is a researcher who's been in this space for decades. Dr. Bredesen has worked with him in the past. And essentially, what he what, he, he's a historian in this space and he goes through and describes how we, we got it wrong. We have been focused, our financial resources, the time, the effort, the energy has been totally focused on amyloid plaques as the cause of Alzheimer's. When amyloid plaques are, they're antimicrobial, they are a response, they're inflammatory, they are a response to a different trigger. And with Dr. Bredesen's approach, it's really this paradigm shift of when we think about, so you have a plant behind you, right? When you think about a houseplant, if it's starting to degenerate, right. If it's starting to die, if you see yellow leaves and you have some evidence that it's not doing very well. Yours is beautiful.

It needs water, but looks okay.

You don't think, oh, misfolded proteins are causing this problem. You think, does it have enough water? Does it have enough light? Is it maybe over watered? Is there some toxin in the, in the, in, in the soup of its soil? Is, does it have enough nutrients in its soil? A plant is a complex organism. The brain and the body are complex organisms. And what we want to do is take that same perspective and say, what's causing the amyloid plaques and how. And this can feel a little overwhelming for people. And so it's, how do we systematically think through all of the potential imbalances that can cause us to get out of that homeodynamics space where things function, where neurons function. And I know you are an expert in toxicity and that, that is where we start.

You know, it's funny, we do some of the work. We, we essentially have said to patients, we take Dale Bredesen's book, I know you do a lot of work with him. We've taken his approach to Alzheimer's because it is a functional medicine approach. It just, it just sort of categorizes it. So we, we say to people, look, you know, we're looking at your minerals, nutrients, we're looking at infections, we're looking at toxins, and we're looking at endocrine in a sort of broad brushst. So can you take us back a little bit? How has the science progressed in dementia care over the last 10, maybe 20 years? What happens there for people?

Yeah, so unfortunately, from a pharmaceutical perspective and from a conventional perspective, although there are these big splashes in the news about these new drugs, Leqembi is the one that's available and somewhat covered by Medicare now. And this has just been in the last couple of years, Aduhelm or Aducanumab was the one before, and that's been pulled from the market. So these are, again, the target was amyloid. So these are monoclonal antibodies that go after amyloid. And the positive side of this, the reason that it was approved by the fda, both of these drugs, somewhat controversially, but is that they slow the rate of progression.

Right.

So we've already established that this is a torturous process. And what happens when you use these monoclonal antibodies early in the disease process? This is only approved for people with mild cognitive impairment, not late stage Alzheimer's. So what happens is that you slow the disease progression by about 30%. And it's also very expensive. And the risk here is that there's a risk for brain bleeding and brain swelling. And so my hope is that these medications, these are kind of first generation, that they figure out a way because there's been so much, billions of dollars have been poured into this and decades of time have been poured into things addressing the amyloid plaque hypothesis. In fact, Dr. Harub, he talks in his book about how if you were not studying amyloid, you weren't studying Alzheimer's. Right. If you had some other take on Alzheimer's, you basically were not in the community. So you weren't funded by the nih, you weren't getting, you know, you weren't getting funded. If you had a pharmaceutical company that was looking into this, it just wasn't happening. And so there was this hyper focus. And some of the research that this was based on, and we found out in the last 18 months or so that some of that research was actually fraudulent. They had been doctoring the pictures, the images that were used to make to draw the conclusion that there was this connection between amyloid and cognition. So one of the things people don't realize is that there was a study published in 2011 that showed that only 2% of everyone from newborns to centenarians, doesn't have amyloid plaque.

We all have it.

We all have it. One night of sleep deprivation leads to a measurable increase in amyloid plaque in the brain. One night of sleep deprivation when you're in your 20s, 30s, or 40s.

Oops.

I had sleep deprivation last night.

Oh, you better make up for it this weekend.

Seriously. I got up to pee and then couldn't go back to sleep. And I was like, awake. And then the cats were playing and I was like, awake. Okay. Anyway, not to get too derailed, I was like, were you awake when I was awake? He's like, yeah, so, okay, so the, the initial research was fraudulent. We've spent the last 20 to 30 years looking in the wrong direction, essentially. Right. We're, we're looking at the wrong thing, or we're looking at the thing that's not driving the bus. We're looking at instead of the driver.

Wendy, I hope it's not all for. Not because I really hope that these medications, they can, like, they'll, they'll complement what we're doing, right, which is upstream, going upstream and saying what is provoking, what is triggering inflammation, what is triggering amyloid plaques. And so like we talked about, sleep deprivation, obstructive sleep apnea, I think is probably the cause or at least contributory.

Right.

We can, we can stack things in both directions. So we can stack, can stack the risk factors. We can have, you know, someone drinking, smoking, have sleep apnea, obese, hypertension, diabetes, and all of a sudden we have a storm, a perfect storm that's going to lead to neurodegeneration. And, you know, when there's that, that genetic predisposition and their apoe. Some we can describe what APOE is, but when someone has an APOE 4, a copy of the 4 from mom or dad or both, that increases your risk that when we start to stack these lifest, these negative lifestyle choices on top of each other, it manifests as dementia. Now, we can also go in the other direction and we can stack lifestyle interventions in a positive way. We can adopt an organic ketogenic diet. We can get on our, on detox protocols and get rid of things that have accumulated over a lifetime. We can sleep well, we can manage our stressors, we can get exercise. We can, you know, foster really loving, meaningful relationships. And those things protect us, see, have good relationships.

But actually, what would you like to say?

Nothing, darling. Mother's Day is coming up, though. I have so many questions.

Yeah. So what is there to do? Like, we just talked a lot about it. Is there like a pattern or is.

There a toolkit like, like in her book?

Sure, that's good. I like that.

Yes, exactly. So Dr. Bredesen, the way he describes the medical side of it is a cognoscopy. Right. So we all get a col. I think now it's 45. You're supposed to get a colonoscopy to understand if you're at risk for developing colon cancer or see if there's the early signs of it are there.

Right.

Prevention, early detection, that's what we're after with a colonoscopy with A cognoscopy. Essentially, it's the same idea, but we're doing it to evaluate are there these risk factors present for your. That's going to put your brain at risk for developing Alzheimer's in 10 or 20 years. We know that those first signs of cognitive change where you can't remember the name of your neighbor who you've lived across the street from for 20 years, or you can't, you keep misplacing your keys or your phone, your brain isn't working the way it did 10, 15 years ago. That early sign that's happening decades after the changes in your brain have taken place. So there's this wide window where we can detect, are there things at play that are potentially driving a neurodegenerative process? And we can stop them. Also that moment, it can be so scary for people, especially if they've had family members who've had dementia and they've supported them or watched them go through that awful process when they don't remember their neighbor's name. They go, oh, my God. The trauma comes back, the fear comes back, the terror, right? And so what my goal with the book, being here with you guys today is to say to everyone who's listening, that's the moment to see a doctor like you guys, to see a doctor trained by Dr. Bredesen, to see a functional medicine doctor, a naturopathic doctor, someone who understands this toolkit, who understands how to apply the medicine so that you can get that cognoscopy so you can evaluate at that moment when it's so much easier to stop the bus, right? To stop that train that's driving you towards Alzheimer's, to stop it in its tracks and start going in the other direction.

So I heard a couple things from what you said. One is, it's never too early, and the time to act is now. Don't wait until it gets worse. It's really. If you have anything in your brain that makes you think, hey, I'm at risk for this, now's the time to get evaluated. Don't wait.

It's so much easier. It's so much simpler. It requires so much less money and effort. If you can get started at those earliest signs, what we see is that, yeah, there are people with later stage Alzheimer's who can improve. They don't go back to work. They don't always get to go back to independent living. And although some of them get better, not all of them. It's much fewer than if we initiate this process earlier on. When people are younger, when they're, they're less progressed along that pathway. And part of it is because of the amount of structural damage right when we first get started, it's a biochemical issue. So we can add the nutrients, we can, we can get rid of the toxins, we can do all these things. And yeah, we can do that later on, but the plaques have built up, the tangles have built up, the neurons have, have degenerated. And yeah, we can, we can grow some back, but we're basically asking for a much bigger shift when, when the disease process has, has progressed more.

So where can people find you? I know. First off, go buy the book. Is it on Amazon? Is it on. Where's the book?

Wherever you find books, you know, we, we love supporting independent bookstores where. But wherever you find books, please get, get a book, write a review, tell us what you really think, and then feel free to join the community@drheathersandison.com My last name is spelled S A N D I s o n doctorheathersandison.com and you can sign up for my email list, learn about, you know, our perspectives on new research that's coming out, new offerings, new things that are happening at Marama and at our clinic. We are looking to create more research opportunities for people to get involved as participants in research trials. So really exciting stuff on the horizon. And I just want everybody to have all of the tools, that toolkit, so that they can optimize cognition wherever they are in the spectrum.

Amazing.

Just amazing.

It is, Heather. Thank you. So. So I think what you left us with is a message of hope. And so get the book. Check out doctorhandlersandison.com we'll put that link in the show notes and then to all the listeners, don't give up. Right? You can alter your future and it starts now. So thanks, Heather, for being here. You're an awesome guest. I love hanging out with you and the listeners. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo at Levitan and we'll see you again soon. Thanks, Heather.

Thanks you guys.

Be well.

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