Louisa Nicola
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Absolutely detrimental. In fact, it's over 70% of US adults don't meet the physical activity guidelines. The CDC states that we need to be doing at minimum 150 minutes to 300 minutes of moderate to rigorous physical activity per week. I think that there is a nomenclature mishap there because physical activity, a lot of people think is doing the gardening.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
When I would lobby against that and say, we should change the words to exercise because exercise is going out and stressing your body. You need to place stress upon a system in order for it to grow. And that's what you do when you exercise. So the mere fact that we are living this sedentary lifestyle, increasing the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease is detrimental.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
People think that, oh, I'm just going to exercise to look good. That's how I think we view exercise still. We don't go to the gym for our brain. We don't go to the gym for our heart. Most people are going to the gym or exercising just to look good. So if you've got that in your head, you may think, well... I kind of look good today. I don't really feel like working out.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
If you don't really understand how fundamental it is for the health of your brain and body and how you actually live your life, like quality of life, you're probably going to be sedentary.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
What you did that day, somebody's name, somebody that you met, you know, that short-term memory, that's the first thing to go. And then you actually get diagnosed at about 70 years old with the disease. And this is an accumulation of amyloid beta, which is a protein. I'm not going to call it a toxic protein.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
This is not new information for me. I often refer to my parents who are late 60s, okay, my father, early 70s. They didn't grow up exercising, but now it's an actual family law now that they are exercising. And the way that I got them to start was just walking. just getting your steps in. And that's the first thing. You don't want to shock your brain. I know that you know a lot about dopamine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And dopamine is that molecule, it's that neuromodulator that gets released in pursuit of a goal. And if you set yourself up to achieve an unachievable goal, like going to the gym or going and doing a huge run, you're probably not going to achieve and it's going to scare your brain. And you're probably not going to wake up and do it the next day. I want everyone to start really easy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You can get so much benefits from walking. I don't know why we've demonized walking. I consider walking one of the best exercises. It's not the only thing we should be doing, but if you are completely sedentary, only meeting three or 4,000 steps a day, set yourself a goal of just doing a walk, an extra walk, just walk. That's all you need to do to start. Then maybe that walk gets a bit faster.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Maybe that walk turns into a jog. Maybe it's a full walk with a 10-minute lunge, walking lunges, if you will. Notice I didn't use the gym there or weights. Nothing is scary about walking.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Even walking uphill, exactly. You want to stress yourself just a little bit, but even getting steps in, the amount of benefits it does for your brain and your cognition is, oh my God, it's unbelievable.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I think that we should be shooting for 12 and a half thousand. Great.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I think so. It comes down to just how much you are pumping blood throughout your body, right? The way that this actually affects brain health actually comes from the heart. Because what we're doing is your brain is the most vascular rich organ.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
the entire body meaning it's got so many blood vessels you've got capillaries which are these one cell thick blood vessels you've got veins you've got these big arteries okay and every single every single vessel feeds the brain with blood. And the moment that that little vessel dies off, you will lose blood supply to that neuron.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That neuron isn't fed with oxygen and nutrients, which is what blood does. So therefore, it's got no use, so it'll die off. We've got around 87 billion neurons
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
in the brain and so if they start to die off over time that's what we get with impairments in our cognition so walking is just a way to just keep flowing blood throughout the body and to the brain because your capilla isn't there we need to be using them so every time you are pumping blood you know, anything above your baseline.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So right now we're probably, depending on how fit we both are, our resting heart rate may be in our 50s, right? So we're pumping, we're doing 50 beats per minute. Whereas if you're just out there walking, you're probably reaching about 100, 110, 130. So you're getting more blood flow than if you were just sitting down. That's my take on the 12,500 steps per day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I'm just going to call it a protein in the brain that we all have that aggregates, it clumps together over time, and it eventually leads to neuron cell death. So this is a long progression. It starts around 25 years old, 30 years old. So the things that we're doing from our 30s impact how our brain will survive at age 70 onwards. Sleep is so fundamentally important for many reasons.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
What's good for the heart is good for the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So let's actually take a bit of a physiology lesson, if we will. And I really want to go back to your previous comment about your viewership being in that 50 to 60-year-old.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
But that's really important because I actually have, as a woman, I have a strong relationship with the association between postmenopausal women and dementia. We know that two out of three cases of Alzheimer's disease is women. right? So we have to understand why that is. And we have to understand the role that estrogen plays, our dominant hormone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So if you are born a female, if you are born with a uterus and ovaries, that's what I mean when I say female, you have more estrogen receptors in your brain. And evidently, as we go through the women, go through the menopausal stages, varies in age, maybe it's around 52, I think that's the global average age, you start to get less estrogen, we don't produce any more estrogen.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Therefore, estrogen is, if that is the most dominant hormone in the brain, we have a higher efficacy of getting these neurodegenerative diseases. So we need to understand, especially as females, just how important exercise really is for a healthy functioning brain, for a healthy brain in terms of function and structure. And I really think that females have been
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
One is, and we'll talk about the different sleep stages, but sleep is where you can repair your brain. You have to think of your brain. It is an organ, but it's also like a muscle fundamentally. We need to rest our body, right? In order for our muscles to grow, regenerate, we need to rest them. We need to hydrate them. We need to fuel them. That's what sleep does for your brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
dramatically understudied when it comes to these diseases in academic medicine. We won't go into that because I have beef with Charles Darwin, so we won't go into that. But I really wanted to highlight that and the importance of ladies in their 50s, in their 60s who are leading up to that stage, how fundamental exercise really is.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That's not too aggressive at all.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That's a true statement from me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yes, and when I said the statistic two out of three Alzheimer's cases are female, we still don't know why, because women are understudied in science. So we need greater advocacy for understanding that. Okay. We need to understand why that is, but we do have a rudimentary understanding and it does come down to estrogen.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So let's go back to the physiology lesson and we can understand why the heart plays a really important role. And this actually comes from Ben Levine, who's a sports cardiologist. And he's done absolutely foundational work when it comes to the structure of the heart. So what happens, just like the brain, as we age... the brain changes. It ages too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We see a decrease in our cell size because as we age, we get a decrease in cell size. It's just part of the natural brain aging process. You're never going to get to age 100 and see thicker cortical areas in your brain as opposed to a 20-year-old. So we just know that. The heart ages too. So as we get older, we get stiffening of the arteries.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
The arteries are big pumps that come out of the aorta that pump your entire body of blood. They get stiffer as we age. What also happens is we have a left ventricle of the heart. We've got a right ventricle. The right ventricle pumps blood to the lungs. The left pumps blood to your entire body, the organs, the muscles. that left ventricle over time gets stiffer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So we get something called left ventricular hypertrophy. So the walls of the left ventricle thicken as we age. Now, Ben Levine was really, he's wonderful. He did a study where he took 53 50-year-olds. He subjected them over the course of two years to maximal aerobic exercise programs. I think it was around three to four hours per week.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Maximal aerobic exercise is when you're pushing past your limits. You're huffing, you're puffing, you're going really hard. He pushed him to that zone. And he took images of the hearts. He did echocardiograms. He did every image of the heart to see the structures. Over the two years, at the end of the two years, he re-scanned the hearts of these 50-year-olds.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And sadly, we're going through an epidemic of sleep deprivation, which is classified as six hours or less. Now, I live in New York. You probably look around you. Most people are sleeping around six hours or less. That's just due to the busy city life. But during sleep, we go through different stages. And the most important stages are deep, slow-wave sleep, which is your stage three sleep.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And he found that he reversed the age-related changes in the heart by 20 years. Wow. So these 50-year-old hearts looked like 30-year-old hearts. Specifically, what he saw was that left ventricle. It actually... the walls got thinner, the ventricle got bigger, so he could allow more blood flow to come in, therefore more blood to the muscles and more blood to the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That was over two years, and that was maximal. And we'll go into that as well because we haven't even touched on resistance training. But we know that you can change the structure of your heart. It's actually called cardiac remodeling. You can remodel your cardiac system. So what happens when we do that? We get a stronger heart, a stronger foundation to pump blood through the aorta.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Now, your aorta... comes up and out of the aorta, we've got branching of two main sets of arteries. You've got the carotid arteries on both sides, obviously, and they supply the frontal part of your brain, the anterior part of the brain with blood. Then you've got the vertebral arteries. They supply the posterior aspect of your brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So the better structured your heart, the better structured your aorta, the more blood will pump more efficiently to the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Absolutely. So what does that mean? Let's go back to aerobic training. You can't just perform maximal exercise. That is just, that is silly. I would never get a 65-year-old who is completely sedentary to go from that to maximal exercise.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Correct. That's why you want to walk. You want to set the foundations. Everything is done in levels. You set the foundations. You build up some angiogenesis, the creation of new blood vessels. You build up your muscles. You build up your tolerance to CO2, right? Then what you want to do is you want to pick it up a notch.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Maybe you jog, maybe you get on a bike, you go a bit harder, and then you build yourself up to be doing maximal aerobic exercise.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So we've got gray matter in the brain and that sits on the outer cortex and they are the cell bodies of the neuron. So the neuron being the chief brain cell and the only electrically active brain cell consists of a cell body, just like the cells in your body. And then you've got this axon that comes off it. The axon has the myelin sheath and that's called the white matter.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So that's the white matter of the brain. And that's where we have speed of thought. We call it conduction velocity in neurophysiology. So that's where our myelinated neurons are. That's the white matter. The gray matter is the cell bodies. That sits on the outside. And we know now that around 70% to 80% of brain gray matter is modifiable by exercise. Modifiable.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Now, the cell body has these little legs that come out. They're called dendrites. And those dendrites will stick to other dendrites of nearby cells. And when they connect, they create a synapse, an electrical synapse. electrical chemical reaction that happens. Okay. And that's what produces our thoughts and our actions. But over time, those dendrites die off, but we can grow new dendrites.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Then we go into REM sleep, and that's stage four. And both serve very, very, very important factors for the brain. Because during deep, slow-wave sleep, you can see this on an MRI and an fMRI, right, a functional imaging machine. Your brain, we have different types of cells. You've got glial cells, which are immunity cells for the brain. We've got neurons. We've got many different other cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And that's what is responsible for greater cortical area and greater cortical mass. And we do that through exercise. So you get greater connections between these cells. So more connections, therefore speed of thought is happening, greater capacity to hear, to learn, to remember, to tell yourself to go to sleep. All of this matters.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
If you care about your brain, you have to love exercise.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And treat it like hygiene. Just the same as you brush your teeth.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Nutrition.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I really love this topic, A, because I'm nowhere in the nutrition space. That's why I love it so much. And B, because I really want to demystify some of the myths that I see on Instagram and other social platforms. The first one being, you ever think about how your brain is what it's made up of? Do you ever think about that?
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I do too. It's interesting because I've seen the brain as I'm an operative neurophysiologist. So I go into brain surgery. So I get to see brains and spinal cords. And it's pretty fascinating when you look at it. And it's like tofu, the consistency of tofu. And you look at it and you know that most of it is made around 60% to 70% of it is made of fat. And the rest is water.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And then we've got this growing body of work that shows that cholesterol, it is made of cholesterol, but that doesn't mean that dietary cholesterol is made for the brain. And I constantly see that on social media, constantly see that people think that dietary cholesterol is what is feeding your brain. But I have to say to you that the cholesterol molecule cannot actually penetrate the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It can't cross the blood brain barrier unless your blood brain barrier is compromised. And that's when you've got more issues. Leaky brain. Correct. And you would know what that is. But that's the first thing that we need to demystify. Cholesterol does not go into your brain and feed your brain, even though your brain predominantly is made of fat.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
20% of the total lipid content in your brain, the total fat content is actually made from DHA. DHA is omega-3 fatty acids. So this is why I advocate for high omega-3 fatty acid content. Omega-3 fatty acids are made of EPA, DHA and ALA, but I'm going to stick to the most important ones being EPA and DHA.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We've seen numerous studies now, clinical studies on humans showing that if you feed your brain four to six grams, some people would argue that's too much, but we know that four grams of EPA and DHA is absolutely fundamental for brain health. And that's what I'm having every day, four grams. So two grams of DHA, two grams of EPA.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
If I was living in a little island in Greece, I probably wouldn't be supplementing. That is because the fish there is fresh. They're catching it from the ocean that is not polluted with plastics and God knows what else. You can't really rely on getting four grams of EPA and DHA from fatty fish alone. You'd be having tons of it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I'm sorry, I'm not too sure that in this country, in the United States, that we're actually getting the recommended dose, even a minor dose of EPA and DHA from fatty fish due to the way that it is actually served to us. So that's why we have to turn to supplementation. I don't like putting pills in my mouth. I would rather get it from food, but we just can't.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
But these glial cells, right, they come from the Greek word glue. It's because they stick and bind to neurons. And what happens during deep, slow-wave sleep is they shrink in size. And then when they shrink, There's the passageway. It allows for the passage of the cerebral spinal fluid in your brain to flush and clean out all of the debris, all of the toxins that build up throughout the day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So we have to be getting it from supplements.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It makes you feel good, yeah. But I'll tell you what else it does. You're not just feeding your brain. I would say that the omega-3 or the EPA and DHA has a safety profile of an FDA approved drug. So it's completely safe to take. This is why I recommend this for everybody. But what it has is it just feeds your brain and your body in so many ways.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
One thing that it does is we know that it can decrease inflammation. Who wants to be in a chronically inflamed state? We know that it can really decrease inflammation. We're seeing studies of it ameliorating, getting rid of and clearing out amyloid beta, which is that toxic protein in the brain. that builds up in Alzheimer's disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
But we also know that it can help with cell membrane fluidity, the way that your cells are moving throughout your body and in your brain. So it does so much. I could list about a thousand things that the omega-3 fatty acid pill does.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It is neuroprotective.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I want to first clarify, I think this is really important to understand the difference between genetic mutations and genetic risk factors. So when we have genetic mutations, let's just say we've got around 25,000 genes in the human genome, If we have a miscalculation on one of those genes, you will have a certain disease. If you've got a mutation on chromosome 4, you'll get Huntington's disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
A genetic mutation in the dementia space involves three genes. You've got presenilin 1, presenilin 2, and the APP gene. right? They are mutations. So if you have these three genes, we know that you are going to get some form of dementia. The other risk factor genes, which I know that you know what they are, we've got two of them called ApoE4.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
If you have the ApoE4 allele, you get one from mom, one from dad, it raises your risk of getting the disease. So they are risk genes. So I think it's really important to differentiate between the two. So what's happening now is that out of that 55 million people that have the genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease, Only 3% to 5% have the APOE4 gene. either one or two.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So they have a higher risk of getting the disease. But the other 95% are getting diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease without having the mutations or the risk genes. So that begs the question of why. You could live your entire life and not get Alzheimer's. Correct. Even, you know, regardless of genes, by the way, regardless of not having the genes. I truly believe that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I do believe at end of life, we are going to die of something. But Alzheimer's disease, is a preventable disease. So you can slow the progression if you've got mild cognitive impairment, or you can completely prevent it through precision medicine, lifestyle interventions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And then you have to question why that is. Now, there was a really famous study, and I hope I don't butcher this study, but there was a famous study that was done in Nigeria, where they did find that there was a large population per capita that actually possessed the ApoE4 gene. The two alleles, you got one, some of them had, it was a high population that had two.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Amyloid beta. You've got another toxic protein in the brain that builds up and aggregates, that kills cells. You've got environmental toxins that build up during the day. All these toxins build up during the day, and it's just a natural process of humans. But that's why we sleep. We sleep to replenish the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
However, they didn't get the disease. Why is that? most likely is because of their lifestyle interventions, which are much different to those in the United States.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. So the omega-3 index test, which was formulated by Dr. Bill Harris, it's a great test. It measures the amount of omega-3s in a red blood cell. This is different from if you go to your PCP and ask for an omega-3 test. That is not the same. I would generally recommend getting, and it's a really simple test. It's just a pinprick test.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Oh, wow. See, there you go. You want a correct ratio, but you also want to be shooting. I don't know if you remember what your percentage was.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So what we know now is that most of the US population is around 4% or less, which is scary because you are increasing your mortality rate with an omega-3 index test of 4% or less. We want to be aiming for an omega-3 index score of 8% or more.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And that's scary, right? I actually tested, I was 10.5.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It is. But I'm very meticulous with my supplementation. So I do believe everyone should get that. But on that as well, I think everyone should be getting a blood test standardized if they can do it twice a year, just to see what is happening. Something as simple as having a vitamin D deficiency is crucial as well. You don't want to have a vitamin D deficiency.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You don't want to have a magnesium deficiency. We now know that we have vitamin D receptors on the brain. In fact, that there are vitamin D receptors on our brainstem. And this is very much correlated with sleep. So we want to have a good understanding of what is happening in our body.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And I would caution against taking any supplement other than omega-3 fatty acids and creatine outside of a blood test. So don't just take vitamin D because you think it's good for you. Go and check.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So if we're not getting into deep sleep, deep slow wave sleep, we're not getting the activation of the glymphatic system. So we're not able to clear out the debris. So what happens over time? It's like compound interest. We don't clean it out one night. It may not do any harm. But if we don't clean it out two, three days a week, and that compounds over the course of 10, 20, 30 years, what happens?
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
the standard American diet. We know that we want to stay far away from your fried foods, from your packaged foods, from your sugary foods. We don't want that. What your brain loves, because we didn't actually touch on this, your brain loves, it turns out, antioxidants. specifically vitamin E, vitamin C, selenium, blueberries, raspberries are some of the most important things for your brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Your brain loves that. Have it, feed it what it loves. And I think instead of talking about what's damaging for the brain, let's stay away from that. Why not talk about What is good for the brain and what are you doing to eat that? Are you eating antioxidants every day? It does love plants. In fact, I'm an omnivore. I eat everything. I don't subscribe to any specific diet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
But I would say now my diet is around 70% plants.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
By volume, yes. 70% plants. I do have red meat. I love red meat and it is not bad for the brain. I do have a lot of fish as well. But really understanding the antioxidant profile, vitamin A as well, your brain loves that. So if you can just stick to that first and foremost, it kind of takes care of itself. You don't need to be eating
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
The foods that we know are fundamentally going to cause mitochondrial dysfunction, metabolic dysfunction. And we also want to maintain a good lipid profile. That is understanding your LDL, your APOB, you know, the plaque that forms in the arteries. That's, again, what is good for your cardiovascular system is good for your brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So you don't want to be overloading yourself with these fats that are going to infiltrate the arteries of the wall.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Oh my gosh, creatine. Creatine has got to be the best thing that you can be taking for cell energy metabolism, for the energy of your brain. I think everyone should be taking at minimum five grams of creatine per day for several reasons. You mentioned a word earlier, neuroprotection.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We want to protect our brain, protect it from something that might occur, whether that is getting hit in the head or just protecting it from our life. Let's admit, it's 2024, every single day we have to wake up, it's like the Hunger Games.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We are getting so many things thrown at us, notifications, stressful events, where we're trying to navigate this food system, where we're trying to find healthy food. So our brain is under attack 24-7. Protecting your brain with creatine is fundamentally so incredibly important.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
What it does is, first of all, the cell energy metabolism, it helps create ATP, which is our energy source, our energy currency. I love it for several reasons as well. It's because we used to think of it as the bodybuilding drug, but we now know that this can be implicated in dieting. neurodegenerative diseases.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We're seeing mouse models being studied where they're dosing them up with like 15 grams of creatine per day. And we're seeing great benefits. We're also seeing postmenopausal women who were on the track to becoming osteoporotic, actually reversing that because they're able to work out more due to creatine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And actually Dr. Darren Kandel was the one who did this wonderful study with women where he dosed them. I think the dosage was 12 grams a day and he increased their bone density and their muscle mass. We increase bone density. We increase muscle mass because muscle is an endocrine organ. And we're going to get into what that is. You have better brain health.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It's like waste products just build up. The garbage, you've got to throw out the trash. If the garbage man doesn't come and take the trash out, what happens? Piles and piles and piles. And out of nowhere, it becomes a clump. And that is then an amyloid beta compound. I would say, ball in your brain that eventually leads to neuron death.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Greater leg size, greater leg strength, bigger brain. So it's all intertwined. So if there are people listening and they think, oh my gosh, but I'm scared to take creatine. I'm scared that it's going to make my hair fall out. There's been no, that is just a myth. It does not increase DHT. So fellas, you can take your creatine. Ladies, it's not going to make you big.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
A lot of ladies are scared that they're going to get big and bulky. It's not going to do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Exactly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And I've got to tell you, it's the most widely studied supplement on the market. So it is the safest.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. So there was actually a study where they actually looked at the creatine gummies and they found that there was no creatine in the actual gummies because what happens is it's got a short half-life. You want to be taking creatine monohydrate in powder form and you actually don't want to mix it with anything. And I'm seeing now this rise in creatine research. So many supplement companies are...
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
becoming attuned with the science, which is great, but they're now creating drinks. You know, I think they're energy drinks where they're mixing creatine and you should know that creatine actually dissolves and you don't get the benefits from it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So you actually, if you're putting creatine with another drink and you're mixing it and you're having it a day later or two, three days later, you're not actually getting creatine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Straight away? Yes, you can do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You do not want to have it standing around.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Correct.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That is correct.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Doesn't have any taste. The best way to do it is put it in your morning coffee. That's what I do with my parents.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. So put in your morning coffee, go about your day, have it every day. Some people ask, should I have it prior to a workout? It doesn't matter when you have it, as long as you do have it. I do have it prior to my workout.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
No, it doesn't. It's just time. I know this because I interviewed the founder of Momentous, which is a supplement brand where they do heavy research on this one product. So back to the gummies, you don't want to be having gummies because the degradation has already disappeared.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Of course. Anything is better than nothing. And you've got to remember, we get creatine naturally in our body already, but we also get it from beef. We get it from liver. We just can't get, just like the omega-3 fatty acids, we can't be having that much beef and liver in one day to get the necessary creatine that we need. If you start on 2.5 grams a day, then that is fine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
If you can tolerate it, you should always start with a small amount of anything, really, even omega-3 fatty acids. If you can tolerate it, if you don't get any distress, I know a lot of women may even feel discomfort with it. You just have to try it out for yourself. If that does well for a week, two weeks, up the dose. And then it's also dependent on body size.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I wouldn't recommend a LeBron James being how big he is, having the same as maybe me or a smaller female. So it's all dependent on body size, what you're doing. There are some men who are having 20 grams per day and they're not experiencing any kidney issues. I just want to put that out there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
The biggest misconceptions that I see with Alzheimer's disease is that it is just something you get as we get older. But I have to say that dementia is not part, not a natural aging disease. We do not have to get this disease. It is completely preventable.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, so what you end up doing, you get a pre-dementia state is called mild cognitive impairment. And we can test this. I've done several brain scans and I've picked up on mild cognitive impairment. It's a pre-dementia state. So now you've reached... healthy to pre-dementia. So if we are in that category, then it becomes, how can we slow the progression of getting Alzheimer's disease?
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Rather than getting it in 10 years or 15 years, how do I eventually get it in 30 years? So these diseases start in your 30s.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
No, look, it's always a good time to start working on your brain. One thing I will tell you, if this is not going to shock people, is we've just had in the United States a new FDA-approved drug that came out on the market. This was around two weeks ago, licanumab or Lekembe. And it's a monoclonal antibody. It's done via an IV.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So if you have the disease, what it does is you put the IV in and over some time, it can apparently ameliorate the amyloid beta, freeing up the brain to get back to its normal state. So many things wrong with that. First and foremost is while that may be true, in the process of it doing that, we've seen patients actually get brain bleeds and affecting the ventricles of the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So even though you may be ameliorating some of the amyloid beta, which by the way, it's a very small amount, a very small amount. In that time you've wasted, it's around $60,000 a year for that drug. You're also increasing your risk of hemorrhaging, like brain bleeds affecting the ventricles of the brain. And so I think to myself,
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Exactly. And you know, now the latest research is showing that even more important than quality and quantity is regularity of sleep, what time you go to sleep and what time you wake up, which makes sense when you understand the evolution of the brain, because your brain loves certainty. It loves regularity. It loves to know that you're doing the same thing over and over again.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
No matter what, you do not want to get the disease because it's not going to be good for somebody who you're living with. It's not going to be good for your economic status because it's around $60,000 a year. And at the end of the day, it's having maybe a 0.1% change in your brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah. Correct, yeah, aducanumab, yes, from Biogen, which was actually retracted as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Exactly.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That is correct. And we are all at the mercy of these massive conglomerates that are... putting the narratives of our life together and essentially dictating how we are going to live for the rest of our lives. And that is because if we get our information from the CDC, the government, Where does the government get funded to give us this information through mainstream media?
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
They are getting their money from the pharmaceutical industry, from the big food conglomerates, and then from the industrial military complex. So if the pharmaceutical company is feeding the... the government and the government is going to mainstream media with their information. And we're looking at mainstream media.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Really, you are putting your life and the course and the quality of your life in the hands of a pharmaceutical company who really are just banking on you getting this disease so you can be giving them a yearly subscription of $60,000 to feed them They are just the same as Netflix.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Netflix is, you know, you need to be paying, what is it, $17 a month, and that's how they thrive as a massive conglomerate in and of itself. We've all got Netflix. It's a subscription. A pharmaceutical company also needs a subscription of some kind. So if mainstream media is what you are watching, we need to get out of there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So if you can be going to sleep at the same time and waking up at the same time every day, you're going to just naturally increase your deep and slow wave sleep because you're going to be waking up with the sun, going to sleep when the sun is going down, and you're going to get this natural rhythm, if you will.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We need to get into the free market, which is podcasts like yours, getting information that is true, that is going to help you survive, that is going to help you stave off these neurodegenerative diseases so you can have a healthy life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I get asked often, did somebody in your family have it? And the truth is, no. My father in 2019 had a stroke, and I've seen some cognitive decline there, but it's actually more of a systemic issue that I feel like I'm fighting here. And to tell you the truth, there's not a lot of us fighting this big fight, and it's a huge fight. This epidemic is big. And it comes from a patient that I saw.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I mentioned to you that as a neurophysiologist, we do a lot of brain scans. You often see, if you've had an epilepsy, for example, or a seizure, you go and see a neurophysiologist, they'll scan your brain. That was my primary role. Scan brains, I think I've done around 1,000 plus. But there was one woman who stood out to me, and she was, we'll call her Betty, 52 years old.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And she kept coming in with complaints. of memory decline, brain fog. By the way, we'll keep hormones out of this. We'll keep the menopausal conversation out because we're just looking at her brain. And she was given all the recommendations from the CDC, just eat a balanced diet, look at the food pyramid. do your exercise, which was the CDC guidelines.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
She was just doing what she thought was good, really not exercising, not properly hydrating, not sleeping well. Over time, she ended up getting the disease. And it was a scary thing because this disease is the only disease that robs you of who you are. When you have end-stage cancer or cardiovascular disease, at least you can understand that who you are as a person, your soul, your brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You go to sleep with your brain and you wake up with your brain and it's just yours. No one else is in there. Imagine losing that. And I saw that because Betty looked at me and said, who are you? Who am I? Where am I? And it had this effect on me. And it was scary because she would look at her kids and she'd be like, who are you?
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And so that's when I thought to myself, this is larger than just Betty. Because if Betty was living a healthy life and she didn't have the ApoE4 genes, she was living such a healthy, in her head, a healthy life. deemed by the information she was receiving, then this is why it's affecting so many people. And let me tell you, Alzheimer's disease doesn't just affect the person affected.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It affects the family around you. Somebody's going to be a carer. Your money's going to go just to medications and you lose everything. So that's why I'm so passionate about it because I know there is information out there that we have to show that you don't have to get the disease.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Correct.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It upsets me that we are at the mercy of these huge conglomerates that are banking on us getting the disease so they can profit, so we can put money in their pockets, so they can have a wonderful life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
While the people down here who may not have the correct education, may not know how to get the resources to understand the education, they're the ones that are suffering and it doesn't have to be that way.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Okay. You want to be exercising. Resistance training. If you can, find a trainer or just start lifting weights or doing body weights if you haven't done that, if you're starting from complete zero. You want to be doing aerobic training. Every day, move your body. Make it like hygiene, the same way that you brush your teeth. That's the first aspect. The second one is work out your sleep.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You don't want to skimp on sleep, making sure that you're improving quality, quantity and regularity of sleep. Then at the top of my pyramid, you've got nutrition, antioxidant rich foods. You want to maintain a good cholesterol panel. Your lipids, you know, test them aggressively. Because even if you are, if you do have the ApoE4 gene, that is involved.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I believe it was only over 10% variation, wasn't it?
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That is the gene that helps transport the cholesterol around the brain. So if that becomes misfolded and it doesn't work well, which is what happens when you've got ApoE4, then you really need to protect your brain. from a high lipid profile. So you really want to protect your brain in that way. Above that as well, we also have in nutrition is hydration. I really love electrolytes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
When I mentioned that your brain cells synapse together, They use a sodium and potassium pump. They are electrolytes. Maintaining good hydration throughout the day. That's your pyramid, right? Then we've got accessory items. It's like the icing on the cake. They are only there to do if you've achieved the pyramid. They are saunas.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, correct. So you don't want a lot of variation. You want to maybe... Regularity. Regularity, exactly. And that's literally just to bank on the slow wave sleep, the deep sleep, stage three, and also the non-REM sleep. That is non-REM sleep and also REM sleep, which is stage four.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It is super scary. So you're right. 55 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's disease. That number will triple by the year 2050. And it seems to be a cascade of different factors that affect it. It's my sole understanding that it comes down to three factors. The first one being... inactivity, so lack of exercise, lack of adequate sleep, and then lack of proper nutrition.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
There is. And it's often said that you can mimic the effects of cardiovascular training. So in case you've had, let's just say you've sprained your ankle and instead of being completely sedentary, you can mimic the effects of cardiovascular training with these heat shock proteins, these heat shock proteins that are released when you are hot. It's basically signaling that
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
to your brain and your body. Guys, she's very hot right now. We need to activate certain systems to cool her down. So it does put you in a stressful situation. Remember, the word stress, you know, there's a term, you know, called allostatic load. You want to stress your body in a good way. You don't want this chronic stress. You want to stress it in a good way. And that's what heat stress does.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It literally is a stressor, but it's a good stressor. And the way that it mimics cardiovascular training is through the blood flow. Because if you are increasing your heart rate because you're getting hot, That means you're getting more blood pumping and you can actually look at your heart rate. I've measured it and I'm sitting around my zone three when I'm in there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That's above aerobic zone, moving into threshold zone. So I'm in that zone three. So my body is pumping blood. What is that doing? That means my heart is getting worked out. left ventricular hypertrophy is going down. I'm increasing the thickness of that arterial wall because the arteries have got muscles around them. So they're squeezing together. So they're getting a workout. You're doing a lot.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And we've also got studies that show that you can also have an effect on the amyloid beta in the brain. Again, another way to just completely downregulate that system.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
The most exciting part of the practice when I work with these people is doing a brain scan, which consists of an EEG and a QEEG. So we're measuring the electrical activity in the brain, but we're also time locking it, meaning that we're picking up on their processing speed, their reaction time, and their visual acuity.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We know that the eyes are just two pieces of the brain on the outside of our body. So we can do so much by understanding how well is your brain functioning from this EEG. So that's one thing that we do, and I'll go into that a bit more. The second most exciting part of it is doing a VO2 max test. Now, I love this because I truly believe that the VO2 max is...
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
the strongest predictor of longevity that we have. We know that maintaining, which is a measure of your peak aerobic fitness, basically measuring how well does your body utilize oxygen when you are at your peak zone. And it's just like a 15 minute test, which is actually quite grueling. I don't know if you've done one. I've done it, yeah. Were you in the elite category?
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
On our intake forms, we often ask, what are you just naturally good at? So I love running, so I will do mine running.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
But the really wonderful thing about it is if you scored in the, let's just say you scored in the average and you want to go up a category, just by going from average to elite or whatever sits between average and elite, let's just say you want to jump that category, you can actually get a 45-day reward. life extension just from going from average to elite.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So you can increase, I believe it's 45 days or it's actually more than that. It even goes up to five years from going below average to elite. You can get a five-year increase in life expectancy. You can increase your longevity from this. When we do this, it's really beautiful to see the changes in somebody.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That's because, and I want to be clear about this, when you get a blood test and just say someone comes back with a vitamin D deficiency, we can up that. Let's just say they've got 20 nanograms per deciliter for their vitamin D. We dose them with 5,000 IUs per day. Maybe we test them three months later and we'd see an increase in vitamin D.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Whereas to go from average to elite for VO2 max, the process that you must take is so beautiful because you have to increase mitochondria during training. You have to increase... your lung capacity. You have to increase stroke volume. The amount of things that you increase during the journey of improving your VO2 max is the name of the game there. So it's not about the metric.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It's not about gaining the 50 or the 45. It is the journey that I'm going to take to get there because that's what's going to increase your life expectancy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, I think the elite part really comes down to doing, we do blood, urine, stool, saliva samples. So we're getting to know every single piece of you through all these different metrics.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We're doing around 16 different tests, but if we can understand all of the areas in your body through blood work, we can understand genetic profiles, we can cross-correlate that with your blood biomarkers, we can do a calculator to figure out your mortality risk. If we put that together with the brain scan, now we're also doing full body MRIs.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We're also doing the DEXA scan, which is coming out with bone density, muscle mass. We get to know the entire individual. The thing that really separates it is actually we've worked really hard on the emotional aspect. of our component. And I don't think a lot of people think about that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
There was a Harvard study done where they tracked individuals over the span of 80 years to see, well, what is the number one thing that can improve brain health as you age? And it turns out that the number one thing is social connections. So we want to ensure that your emotional aspect of who you are is thriving. Because if we can get that right, it'll improve sleep. It'll improve exercise.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It'll improve your relationship with food, the quality of your relationships with other people, the way that you go out and see the world. Your brain wants to see different things. It loves nature. It loves seeing so many things, holding different things. So if we can do that, then that's truly what's going to make you a high-performing individual.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I maintain extremely beautiful friendships that are like relationships, if you will, to some extent. I have a close group of girlfriends who I don't treat them really any differently than I would a partner. They're like family. They're like family, correct. But I maintain them to an extent where I do put in a lot of time and a lot of energy in understanding who they are.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And I always say this, whenever one of us goes through something, we all go through it. And so I really put them... in that category of like they are family. So I try and maintain them over a long period of time. But then also just social connections. I live in New York. I'm here in LA for two weeks.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Every day I'm meeting with people who are in my network, who share the same vision as me for health and performance. And when I'm with them, it feels like I'm getting a burst of energy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Absolutely. Off air, we were mentioning one of my dearest friends who is Casey Means, Dr. Casey Means, who I know that you've interviewed. Casey came into my life when I actually interviewed her and she's remained, you know, and when we, I interviewed her for my podcast and this was back before she had a book and she was talking to me about blood glucose and this was back in very early 2020.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And we, it was like an instant connection. And when I'm with her, It is like we share so much about the world and about health and performance, metabolic dysfunction. But I describe her, her book, it's funny, her book is called Good Energy. But when I describe her, she gives me energy and that's what I look for. It's like a life force.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And it's a really beautiful thing when you do put in the time and effort to find your people, you do get a high ROI from it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yes.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Oh my gosh, that is so beautiful. I'm so happy that you mentioned that to me because now I'm going to be just looking this up and researching it and probably putting it out there. I'm putting the message.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I'd be remiss though, if we don't actually touch on, and I'm moving away now because my juices are flying. I'm just very excited. We didn't even touch on resistance training.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Let's talk about that because that is my actual thesis. And I just had a review article get published, which is all based on resistance training. So... What we know is that resistance training is absolutely crucial for the brain. We know that it can build better brains, but the mechanism is what I want to talk about.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
How does growing bigger muscles or simply the journey of growing bigger muscles improve brain health? It turns out that when we exercise our muscles, let's just say we're contracting our muscles, Our muscles are like a storage sink of these amazing pharmaceutical molecules. They're called myokines. So they're muscle based proteins. They live in the cell body of the muscles.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And when you contract your muscles, they get excreted. They go out into the blood and they go into necessary organs. They pass the blood brain barrier, these little molecules. and they help with the growth and proliferation of BDNF. So BDNF is brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It's one of the key ingredients in growing new brain cells in that hippocampal region.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Another one called irisin, which was named after the Greek god of Iris. It's a messenger molecule. So when that gets excreted from the muscle belly and goes into the brain, it actually tells BDNF to express itself even more. We've got cathepsin B, myostatin. We've got IL-6. interleukin-6, which is originally a pro-inflammatory cytokine.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
But when it's released from the muscle specifically, it becomes anti-inflammatory. So there we go. We're going to be down-regulating inflammation from resistance training. So you can build a better brain through resistance training alone. We're now even seeing maximal aerobic exercise and resistance training having an effect on circulating blood
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
circulating tumor cells so when a tumor is formed for example this is a really great study in cell press it was to do with prostate cancer and the inhibition of prostate cancer via these myokines but what happens is let's just say you form a mass if you will at stage one
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That tends to break and I'm not an oncologist, but I'm reading the research that tends to break off and you get these circulating tumor cells and they end up going and aggregating and forming another tumor, which ends up becoming metastases. We now have evidence that the sheer force and shunting of blood flow through aerobic and maximal exercise can ameliorate these circulating tumor cells.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And not just that, these myokines can inhibit the growth of these prostate cancer cells. So you're not just having an effect on the brain. We're now seeing exercise and cancer. this crosstalk between the two. So we're just probably at the early stages of that. But resistance training should be part of your hygiene as well, your daily hygiene.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You want to be shooting for three to four days a week of resistance training, but here's the caveat. You have to be going hard. We know that more is better when it comes to how much, how many myokines are released. So when I say more, meaning that you really want to stress the muscles of, you really want to stress your biceps, for example.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
So you want to be lifting at around 75 to 80% of your one repetition max and A lot of people may be saying, well, what is that? Basically, you want to be lifting to the point where you get to rep six. It's really difficult, like you're shaking. So you really want to be working hard out. You want to be doing three to four days a week of resistance training alone.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You want to be doing three hours a week at minimum of aerobic zone two training.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah, and the way that they measured this, Benta Peterson was the one who actually coined the term myokine and her first work was done, I believe she's an endocrinologist, was done on IL-6. She was doing it for immunity purposes. She was doing immunity studies. And when she found that IL-6 is elevated in the blood, I mean, I think there was a half-life to it as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Like she was doing it probably three or four hours after intense training. So I don't know how far it would be, but it would be elevated to some extent.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Exactly. But bottom line there is that resistance training is, it serves as this, I guess, as this protective shield for your brain and your body as you get older. Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
I think women have been served with this fear that they may get big if they lift weights, which is a very big misconception. And I want females to understand the relationship between bone density and estrogen, because there is a reason why postmenopausal women are more prone to osteoporotic fractures. It's because of the loss in estrogen.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
We need to increase our bone density in the way that we do that. apart from nutrition, is via resistance training. It's the best way to improve bone density because when you are obviously lifting weights and you are contracting your muscle, that muscle is pulling on the tendon and the tendon is connected to the bone. So you're getting, your bone is stressing.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
And what happens when we stress the system? Breaks down and it builds back stronger. So resistance training, fundamentally important for women everywhere because of this reason.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
100%. But there's a subcategory of our practice, which is we're also an education company. So we teach coaches, trainers, executive coaches about these six fundamentals of performance and longevity. So if anybody's interested in that, definitely give that a look at too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
The Neuro Athletics Coaching Certificate.
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come over to Instagram and say, hi, LouisaNicola underscore.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You have the power to change the course of your life. Every single day you have the opportunity to refabricate your brain through lifestyle choices. Your brain is made from the foods you eat and the exercise you do and the quality of sleep that you have. So bank on those because it will be the greatest investment in your life that you can ever have.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Thank you, Drew. You too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
You also want to ensure that you are warming up for sleep. If you treat sleep like a sport, then you've got to think about it like, okay, it's 8.30 p.m. I want to be asleep by 10 p.m. That's the golden rule with me. Bed lights out 10 p.m. asleep. If you want to have that as your sleep time, that means you're going to have to start warming up for sleep at 8.30 p.m. That may involve...
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
having your last meal at 8 p.m., turning down the lights, getting relaxed, don't answer emails, don't be doing anything too chaotic, and, of course, staying clear of alcohol and marijuana if you are a regular user.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
The most powerful intervention that we have to slow the progression of these disease states is exercise. Exercise can be broken up into three categories. You've got resistance training, you've got aerobic training, and then you've got neurocognitive training. Aerobic training is absolutely fundamental for the brain and for this specific reason.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It can help with the growth and proliferation of new neurons. So you can literally grow new brain cells in your brain in specific areas that are involved in the degeneration of or the accumulation of Alzheimer's disease. So you've got a little area in your brain. It's deep in the temporal lobes, which sit behind the ears. It's called the hippocampus. It's a seahorse-shaped structure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
That's where we hold all of our memories, memory formation, learning as well. And that's the first thing to shrink. The structure of it shrinks. The volume size and the neurons inside it shrink. So evidently, when that shrinks, any part of the brain that shrinks and dies off, we lose aspects of what that controls. So that's why we lose our memory.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
But we've known now since 1960, to be exact, or the 1960s, that we can grow new neurons in the brain, which can help with better learning, better memory. We also know that through aerobic physical activity, I'm talking your long runs, your zone two cardio, we know that you can actually build greater connections. So your brain cells... synapse with each other.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
Well, we have to understand, first of all, the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's disease. So we know in these neurodegenerative diseases, neurodegenerative, so they build up over time. More often than not, you're getting diagnosed with your first symptom of Alzheimer's disease around 65 years old. And the first sign is episodic memory. That is the first thing that starts to go.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
They connect with one another to provide our thoughts and our actions. And we can now see that with more exercise, you can get more connections between brain cells. So you can grow the cortex of your brain. We've known that since the 1960s because the first studies ever done were on mice. where they subjected mice to a little shoebox, one group, which didn't have much activity, much light.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
It was a very dull environment. They weren't doing much movement. Then they put another set of mice in this wonderland, if you will, where they had circuits. They had so many things going on. And over the course of six months, they saw that these mice actually grew the cortex, the outer layer of the brain, and they grew new connections in the frontal part of the brain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Neurophysiologist Shares Top 3 Drivers of Alzheimer’s Disease, How To Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline At Any Age, and How to Build a Super-Brain with Louisa Nicola (Rebroadcast)
The frontal part, Drew, is what is responsible for our executive functions. Information processing speed, your ability to think, your ability to make sound decisions. These areas grow thickness-wise just through aerobic physical activity.