Dr. Heather Sandison
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
I came to this as a skeptic. I had heard, like most clinicians, I was trained that there was nothing you could do. And as you mentioned, to suggest there was something we could do for someone struggling with cognitive decline on their way towards Alzheimer's, it would be to give them false hope.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
I'd love your opinion on RO, water reverse osmosis, is a great way to get a lot of toxins out, but it does require remineralization because it'll take the minerals out of the water. Yeah. So getting away entirely from plastic, from drinking anything out of plastic, particularly because hot plastic will leach into the water.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
But even just the screw cap, it's like you've got plastic sawdust in there. And so I think plastic water bottles are just toxic for so many reasons. But yeah, we could talk for a weekend on all of the ways to think through toxicity. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
The conventional model and the incentive structure of sort of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, the way that healthcare is set up is that what we want to find is a single molecule intervention, right? That can be patented. that is very simple to dispense from a pharmacy. There's simple instructions. Just take this one pill once a day and you'll feel better.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And that works if you've got a UTI, right? And we can get a cure. And that can be in the past. Take antibiotics for seven days. Don't have to think about it again, hopefully. Now, when we're talking about Alzheimer's, this is very complex. And our friend, Daniel Schmottenberger, he really taught me to think. And I feel very privileged to have spent a lot of time discussing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Oh, I'm writing that down. I'm not familiar with IGL, but I have been using the Patricia Kane, the phosphatidylcholine for a long time, for many years, the IVPC. And we do the exchange by IV and then also oral PC, which we know helps with gallbladder, basically the discharge of bile, that toxic sludge that we build up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And so PC, I think also very clear that that helps with the brain as this phosphatidylserine and choline is part of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, the most abundant neurotransmitter in the brain. But choline, we do know that choline has a big role to play in the brain. So not just the phosphatidylcholine, but choline found in eggs and in other food sources and also in many nootropic formulas.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Are you doing the inessential vials?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
20 of them. Wow. Yeah, we do five typically.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
I would love that. Yeah, because are you dipping it in D5W?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Yeah, Rich Horwitz has also seen that the treatment of Lyme disease can help with dementia. My patients, the first patient I saw who really opened my eyes to this, Darlene was her name, and she came in soon after I was trained by Dr. Bredesen in 2017. And she... And her husband came in. She was entirely dependent on him. She had a MOCA score of two.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
So the MOCA is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. And we use this as a clinical tool to tell us where on the spectrum of cognitive decline someone is. And a perfect score is 30. It's a one-page worksheet that some of your listeners may be familiar with. You copy a cube and draw a clock, identify some zoo animals. And she had a MOCA score of two. So she was essentially answering...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
She was answering questions with yes or no and not much more than that. Their life had been completely changed since she had gone down very quickly with dementia and diagnosed Alzheimer's. Now, her very dedicated, loving husband had read Dr. Bredesen's book and was all in. I mean, he had, thank goodness, enough confidence for both of us because I had never done this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
We would meet every Tuesday afternoon for four, five, six hours on these marathons, just kind of reprogramming my brain about how to think through diagnosis of complex disease. And put simply... When you think of any complex system, whether it's a houseplant or a financial system or government systems or the brain, what you're looking for is balance, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And she was so severe that I wasn't hopeful at all.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Yeah. 26 and above is normal. Once you're down in the single digits, this is severe dementia. This is where you are dependent on others for activities of daily living. Your dignity is more or less gone, right? You're not able to do anything on your own.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And so she was in that, in that state, but she had this bright smile and her eyes would track me and she had on this beautiful floral dress and you could just see how much soul was in her. And they just shocked me. Um, she came back, uh, six weeks later and her mocha had gone up to a seven. And of course my initial response was like disbelief.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
I was like, Oh my gosh, we must have done the test wrong. Like this isn't possible. Like what is going on here? And her husband assured me, no, no, she's different. Listen to her. She was speaking in complete sentences. They started bickering about something while they were in my office and she was remembering things that he had said and And she wasn't going back to work. She wasn't 100% better.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
But this was the moment. I mean, I remember it like exactly what I was wearing and the way the light was shining in the room because it was so emotional for me to be like, what? If this is possible for Darlene, what is possible for everybody else who's not so far down along this path? There is so much suffering that we could be avoiding by taking this approach. So what did they do?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
They moved out of a moldy bedroom, and they didn't have to move out of their house entirely, but they moved into their living room. They started ballroom dancing three times a week, even though they weren't very good at it. They were going on walks every day. They got on a ketogenic diet. They ate only whole foods, got rid of all of the processed foods in their diet.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
She got on all the supplements that we put together based on Dr. Bredesen's approach. She got on bioidentical hormone replacement. She went and got the mercury out of her teeth, her root canals out. She got all of her dental work taken care of very quickly. And lo and behold, she improved.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And I really owe so much to obviously Dr. Bredesen, but also to Darlene and her husband, because that was the moment I could not deny how much better she had gotten. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
It was a seven men and she continued to go up a bit. I've lost touch with them. They're doing things on their own, but we were together for a couple of years and probably like your patients, you hear from them years later and you think, oh, have they gone down or do they need extra help? And she'll probably be like, nope, we're doing great. They were very motivated. It was really fun.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And imbalance is going to create dysfunction in that complex system. And so imbalance is going to be too much or too little or at the wrong time or in the wrong place. And when we think of the brain, this leads to disease when we have imbalance, especially over time. And so we can say, okay, imbalance that this is helpful. We'll simplify.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And then we want to systematize imbalance of what, what are the causal level factors? And I would argue that they are, there's six of them. It's toxins. And so imbalances of toxins in the wrong place at the wrong time, too much, too little. nutrients, right? You mentioned insulin resistance and blood sugar becoming so high that it becomes toxic. That can be a problem.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
But also you mentioned B12 and having too little B12 associated with genetics. And maybe for your neighbor, they need more B12 than you do. So we have these individualized needs and requirements where we're going to get that functional requirement met, not just the RDA, not just that recommended daily allowance. So we have toxins, nutrients, stressors.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
We can have too much or too little stress, right? Some people want to kick their feet up and just relax in retirement, but they're not getting that engagement. And then we also know on the flip side that caregivers, care partners for people with Alzheimer's are at higher risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's themselves later on because they have too much stress.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Cortisol becomes literally toxic to the hippocampus, those memory centers of the brain. So toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure. You mentioned getting hit over the head and causing pain. Well, that can also cause inflammation in the brain and be a traumatic brain injury that can put us at risk. You mentioned ApoE4.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
We can have molecular structure, genetic structure that puts us at risk for developing Alzheimer's later on. So again, toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure. Infections. We know there are a handful of infections that are directly associated with the triggering of amyloid plaque production. So things like P. gingivalis, which causes gingivitis in the mouth.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Also, the Lyme spirochete has been found in amyloid plaques. as well as H. pylori is associated, and herpes, the herpes simplex, one virus is another one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
The gut-brain connection and infections in the gut can lead to imbalances in neurotransmitters, and there's many other, I mean, in fact, I have a reverence for how complex the gut-brain connection is and wouldn't pretend to understand it fully, but we know that there's a lot of back-and-forth communication between the gut and the brain, and the microbes specifically in the gut have a lot to do with that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
So again, toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure, infections can lead to dementia. And then signaling, are we getting the signals? Dr. Bredesen has this phenomenal, I love this analogy of brain health, thinking of your brain like a country, my brain is gone. If we are stuck in that fight and defend mode, if we're being invaded by...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
infections or if we need to defend against toxins like heavy metals you mentioned or mold toxicity or chemical toxicity, then we're using our resource to take care of that attack and defend. We're not able to use that resource to build the infrastructure, to build new neurons and new connections between those neurons the way a country might build roads and schools.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
We want to use those nutrients to fully resolve those issues that we're attacking and defending against. And it makes sense that if we're trying to do both, we're not going to be very good at doing either. We're not going to fully resolve the infections or fully resolve the toxic burden.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And we're also not going to be that great at having functional neurons to help remember our neighbor's name or remember where we put our phone or our keys. So what we want to do is think really holistically about this. You mentioned, you know, there's multiple factors that go into brain health.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And this is what I would think of as a comprehensive list, although I'm sure we will continue to know more. But it's a much more comprehensive way to approach each individual and what's causing them to go down this path towards this common diagnosis of Alzheimer's or memory loss associated with age.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Yeah, so... When I work with a functional medicine patient, there are all these medical pieces that I almost think of as icing on the cake. So I definitely want to go in this direction and support people in knowing how to communicate with their doctor and knowing what to ask for and what kind of testing. And certainly there are a ton of modifiable things that we can address.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And I also want to just take this step back to say, there are a ton of things that you can do without the help of a doctor, right? The foundations, like if that's the icing on the cake, it's all of the functional medicine interventions. the foundations really come back to diet, exercise, sleep, stress management.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And so I, of course, want to, because we're both functional medicine practitioners, I want to dive into that deeply. And I wish that the whole medical system was coming in that direction. But I also don't want to miss the opportunity to tell people, if you don't have access to that, if cost is an issue, there are many, many, many things that have an outside impact that
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
that really come back to what are the things I put in my mouth every day? What do I eat? What do I consume? What are the nature of my relationships and my stress levels? What time do I get to bed each night? How much movement do I get each day? Those are the things that really impact health over time. Now, these hidden causes, these hidden things, this exposome, these dementogens,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Toxins are a big part of that. And I think of three flavors. There's chemical toxicity, which is ubiquitous. None of us are going to be able to avoid it all. But there are great strategies for avoiding the things that we have control over. You talked about modifiable risk factors and not modifiable risk factors. And
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Just to give people kind of a sense of what the difference is there, we can't change the year you were born, right? We can't change your chronological age. As that increases, our risk of dementia goes up. We can't change that you're born male or female. And if females have higher risk of dementia, they're two-thirds of dementia or Alzheimer's patients.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And we also can't change your genetics, your ApoE status. This is set. But what can we change? We can change our toxic exposures. We can increase our ability to detoxify, whether it's one of these three flavors, heavy metals, mycotoxins or mold-associated toxins associated with water-damaged buildings, which I see many elderly folks who have been in their houses for a long time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Really big kind of underrepresented issue. And my other mentor is Dr. Neil Nathan, who I'm sure you've come across.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
I feel really grateful to have learned from him how to support very sensitive patients and also to just be hypervigilant about that potential mold exposure. And then these chemical toxins that I mentioned. So metals, molds, and chemicals.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And although we can't completely avoid all of them, what we can do is we can measure how much we're being exposed to and see if there is some detective work that can go into that. Lowering our exposure to phthalates or petrochemicals or Roundup glyphosate is a big one that directly impacts the nervous system. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Stephanie Seneff.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
She was at MIT and has done extensive research on how glyphosate impacts the nervous system. Yeah, she's been on the podcast.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Yeah, she's fantastic. And understanding what's coming into my system, and then can my genetics tolerate those toxins? And how can I increase my ability to get rid of toxins through my liver, through my bowels, through my kidneys, through skin and lymph, maybe even through breath work, through the lungs, so that we can optimize for cellular health?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
Yeah, so we do tests through real-time labs, has an environmental pollutant panel. And so I do look at urine, at urine levels of excretion. And what I've seen is many of the sickest people, they actually don't collect much in their urine the first time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
But then as we start using some binders, some glutathione, some support, some biochemical support, as we start getting them sweating, maybe get them on a detox breathwork practice, we see that those numbers will go up. And so it's almost like, again, hidden, even with our testing, some of those exposures and that total toxic burden, it takes a little bit to uncover.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
And three, six months later, we see those numbers go up even when there isn't an active exposure, but it's just that they're starting to actually mobilize more of it. Also, getting on a ketogenic diet, we start to mobilize fat-soluble toxins.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
As we are using the fats to create fuel, we can get that from adipocytes, and then we're releasing those toxins into the bloodstream, and then it's coming out in the urine a little bit more. I think that many of these toxins, initial testing can also be deceptive. Most of my patients are over 65. They've had a lifetime to accumulate these things. And this can be such a scary conversation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW
It can very quickly go to overwhelm and anxiety about how much toxicity is in the environment. We can only control what we can control. So I think testing your water or getting spring water, findaspring.com, I think is a great source to find spring water near you that hopefully isn't contaminated.