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)
Wed, 28 May 2025
This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Levels, and Branch Basics. Alzheimer’s doesn’t begin at diagnosis—it starts decades earlier. That means the choices we make right now can have a major impact on our brain health down the line. But with so much conflicting health advice out there, how do you know what really moves the needle? Today’s guest cuts through the noise and shares the most effective, science-backed strategies to protect your brain, no matter your age. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re revisiting one of our favorite episodes with neurophysiologist Louisa Nicola. Louisa shares the top three lifestyle factors that can influence our risk for Alzheimer’s disease. She helps us sort through the most current research and uncovers the biggest myths. She also shares the top two supplements that are critical for protecting brain health and the optimal prescription for exercise and resistance training. Looking to protect your brain health? Louisa shows us how. Louisa Nicola, an Australian-born neurophysiologist and sports scientist, has made significant strides in the field of brain performance and human potential. In 2016, she founded Neuro Athletics, a consulting firm dedicated to optimizing brain health and performance for athletes, executives, and high performers. Louisa's innovative methods improve reaction times, decision-making, and mental acuity. Her vision is to expand Neuro Athletics' reach, empowering more individuals to achieve their full potential through enhanced brain function and mental resilience. In this episode, Dhru and Louisa dive into: The alarming increase in Alzheimer's disease despite genetics (00:33) Why sleep is a critical factor in preventing disease (2:43) The impact of a sedentary lifestyle on increasing your risk for Alzheimer’s disease and tips for beginners (17:47) Physiology as we age (34:35) Fundamental pillars of nutrition and the power of Omega-3 fatty acids (42:20) Creatine for neuroprotection, energy, and reversing osteoporosis (54:02) The biggest myth about Alzheimer’s disease (01:02:51) What motivated Louisa to study Alzheimer’s disease (01:05:44) Actionable steps you can implement to reduce your risk (01:08:50) Implementing sauna into your routine to induce good stress (01:12:13) Brain optimization beyond the fundamentals (01:15:12) Social connections that power health (01:23:18) Bigger muscles-better brain health (01:31:20) Also mentioned in this episode: Omega Quant Test Neuroathletics Instagram Sleep Regularity as a Predictor of All-Cause Mortality Study For more on Louisa, follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, or visit her Website. This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Levels, and Branch Basics. Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the Momentous Three: Protein, Omega-3s, and Creatine made by and used by the best. Head to livemomentous.com and use code DHRU for 35% off your first subscription. Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link: levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today. Right now, Branch Basics is offering 15% off the Premium Starter Kit; just go to branchbasics.com and use coupon code DHRU. Make 2025 your cleanest, healthiest year yet with Branch Basics! Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the alarming statistic about Alzheimer’s disease?
Louisa, welcome to the podcast. You know, I want to start off with something pretty mind-blowing that I learned from you. So globally, we have about 50, 55 million people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. But the crazy part is, is that that's set to triple by, I think, 2050 is what I learned from you. But even crazier than that is that only three to five percent of all diagnosed disease are
are driven by our genetics. So that begs the question for myself and our audience, what the heck is happening for the other 95 to 97% of people who unfortunately are ending up with this super scary disease?
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.
Let's unpack those. Let's start off with the first one, which I actually want to kind of go out of order.
Yeah.
So let's start off with the first one and talk about sleep. Everybody sleeps, or you would hope so, but what is going on in our modern day society that we're not sleeping good enough that's impacting our brains?
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Chapter 2: Why is sleep critical for brain health?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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Chapter 3: How does a sedentary lifestyle increase Alzheimer’s risk?
What's good for the heart is what's good for the brain. But I guess both are true, right? That's correct. Anything that you can do that's going to be supporting your brain health, generally speaking, those things are all good for the heart. Yeah. But in the way that you're talking about it, really, if you can prioritize your cardio training...
just by a vigorous walk that's there or other things that are supportive and you start where you are and you build up further sure if you can work your way slowly up to resistance training that's going to be helpful but those things are going to be good for your heart but they're also going to be super powerful for your brain connect the dots of why would that be that all this movement would be supporting either a delayed diagnosis of alzheimer's disease or hopefully knock on wood you know not getting alzheimer's
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Chapter 4: What are the fundamental pillars of nutrition for brain health?
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.
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.
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,
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.
Yeah, and based on the accounts that you read out there, the FDA sort of felt pressured to approve it because they didn't want to discourage pharmaceutical companies from continuing further innovations in Alzheimer's, even though they know that the benefit is so low compared to the cost and the risks that are there. And the Alzheimer's category has had a few drugs in this space.
What was the other one? Adjuvant or something like that?
Yeah. Correct, yeah, aducanumab, yes, from Biogen, which was actually retracted as well.
Yeah, it was retracted, and all these insurance companies came out and said, we're not going to pay for this. If everybody who had the potential of getting Alzheimer's was on it because it was so expensive, it would have bankrupted our country.
Exactly.
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Chapter 5: Why are Omega-3 fatty acids essential for brain function?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You know, as I mentioned earlier, you're one of the top experts in this space. I want to know, and the audience wants to know, what's your why? Why is a young person like yourself so passionate about this topic of Alzheimer's disease?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: How does creatine support cognitive health?
Chapter 7: What lifestyle changes can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s?
Now that we've covered a lot of the basics, and the basics, as you mentioned, that's the foundation that's there, and then there can be things that are icing on the cake. What are some of the most...
exciting things let's start off with biomarkers or tests that you care about when it comes to optimization whether you're an athlete whether you're a high performer or somebody that wants to kind of operate like those individuals what do you care about the most when it comes to biomarkers
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.
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...
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?
I was elite for my age group. And I've talked about this on the podcast a little bit. I've written about it. I scored a 45, six, somewhere right around there. Placed you in the elite category.
Yes.
It placed me in the top. I got to look at the chart, but for my age, I'm 40. I'm about to turn 42. I did it when I was 41. It placed me at the top percentile for my age group. Brilliant. And I also ended up having to end the test a little early. So I went to a place, shout out to TriFit here in Santa Monica in Los Angeles. And there's different ways to do the test, as you know.
You could do it running. Some people do it on a bike. And then some people do it rowing. I really hate running and I have probably bad, I don't probably, I definitely have bad biomechanics. I also, prior to that test that I did with the VO2 Max, I don't know when the last time it was that I ran with like shoes on. I love sprinting at the beach. I love like these short bursts.
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