Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner
of functional medicine.
The focus of today's talk is going to be about dementia, about mild cognitive impairment.
The earliest form, I've been getting a lot of questions about this.
What is the difference between Alzheimer's and vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia,
frontal lobe dementia?
Okay, not everybody's been asking me all of those specific details, but mainly just about
what can I do?
Alzheimer's is horrible.
You lose your memory.
It's really stressful on the families, more so on the families of the people who get the
dementia than it is on the person themselves oftentimes.
So we're going to talk a lot about that.
I wish I had, I wish I could forecast that I could say at the end of the talk, we're
going to, I'm going to give you some glowing examples, testimonials of patients that have
had made dramatic recoveries.
And I'm sorry, I don't have those because unfortunately, most people wait till it's
too late to make a dramatic recovery from dementia.
We're going to talk a lot about why that is, but there is some exciting news.
I do have scores of patients, maybe, maybe over a hundred or two, not, not thousands
certainly, but many patients who have made some improvement, you know, people, people
are frustrated that when they start to notice the first signs of memory loss and other symptoms
associated with any form of dementia, Alzheimer's is just the most common.
Oftentimes, at that point, 30%, this is a little known fact, when you first start to
notice that persistent memory loss, if you forget where you put your keys once in a while,
it's not a big deal.
There are tests for this.
Maybe we'll have time to talk about those standard tests they do to diagnose mild cognitive
impairment, the precursor and, and full blown dementia of any type.
But you know, if you have, if you have memory loss, everyone loses their keys once in a
while.
What matters is when you have that persistent progressive memory loss where you and especially
those around you notice that you're repeating yourself or forgetting things and it's becoming
more consistent and getting worse.
And unfortunately, this is the worst part.
By the time you get to that point, you've usually lost 30% of that part of the brain,
the part of the brain just inside your temples called the hippocampus, where memories must
be encoded before they're stored.
This is really important to understand, especially for if you have a loved one with dementia,
this is really important to understand.
We experience normal human beings throughout our lives, we experience that, that we see
something happen, we say something, we do something, and we automatically remember it,
if it was something we just did 30 seconds ago or five minutes ago, it's just automatic.
Of course you would remember that you just said it, you just did it.
Well, when that happens, it's a two step process that has to work or it won't.
And the two steps are anything that you experienced goes through this hippocampus, this part of
your brain just inside your temple to get processed and sorted and sort of like a filing
clerk part of your brain that decides where this memory should be stored.
And then it's sent to the library, to the storage facility up in the higher parts of
your brain for long term storage, that's where long term memories are stored.
Well, all memories are stored in parts of the brain that are higher up.
So the part of your brain must, that decides where to store that, the hippocampus, it's
called just inside the temple, that part has to work for you to remember anything, even
if it just happened 30 seconds ago or five minutes ago.
And that is one of the most common areas that becomes degraded, you start, you lose cells
in that part of your brain, it stops working, it stops recording and filing, it stops filing
the memories, the experiences that you have ongoingly.
So anybody who has a loved one with dementia, I hope it helps to understand this.
I'm sure you don't understand it just from me talking about it for a couple of minutes,
but you can look it up, there's some great resources out there, email me with questions,
it's really helpful to understand this, both for people who are first starting to notice
cognitive impairment, but especially for the loved ones who are noticing that someone that
they love can't remember something they said 30 seconds ago or who's repeating themselves.
If the hippocampus stops working, it doesn't matter that someone just said something or
just did something or just asked you something because memories are no longer being filed
properly.
They go in and they get stuck and then they just vanish because they haven't been stored.
So the good news is anything you've ever heard of to increase your cardiovascular health
and we hear about these things all the time, the entire month of February, I talked about
things you can do to prevent and reverse cardiovascular disease in three simple steps.
Keep the pipes clear, keep the pressure low and keep the pump strong.
So you keep the pipes clear by reducing plaque formation and reversing it.
It is actually possible to reverse plaque formation.
You keep the pressure low by doing all kinds of things that go review the previous episodes
on ways that you might not have heard to reduce your blood pressure apart from taking medication.
But if you need medication, this is one of the medications that you definitely want to
take.
You definitely want to check your blood pressure.
Make sure that you're keeping it below 140 over 90, preferably below 130 over 90 if you
want to maintain your heart health, but also your brain health.
So keep the pipes clear, keep the pressure low and keep the pump strong.
Exercises of course the way you keep the pump strong, the best kind of exercise to do is
the one that you will do with the least amount of effort or you know, the district puts the
fewest hurdles in front of you.
Something you enjoy, something as simple as walking.
If you're young and you love, you know, doing really intensive exercise, running marathons,
doing intensive workouts, you know, that's the best form for you.
If you're older, maybe just walking, you know, for most older people just going for a walk.
The nice thing about walking is it doesn't require a gym membership, it doesn't require
any special equipment.
You just put on some shoes and go outside.
And if you are looking for an excuse to walk or a reminder to walk, it's always nice.
They've even done studies on this.
Get a dog.
There was one of the best ones I heard was about some stockbrokers in New York City.
If they, these are really, really high stress people that have high risk of dropping dead
from a heart attack in, you know, their 40s or 50s even.
And stockbrokers who got a dog, I don't know, I don't have the study in front of me, but
had a dramatically reduced risk because of the comradship of the dog I suppose was partly
something to do with.
I suspect it's largely just because it forces them to go out and walk the dog.
Swimming is also an excellent form of exercise if you have access to a pool because it works
your entire body.
And if you're older or if you have physical limitations, just the buoyancy and the warmth
of the water can help a lot of people with arthritic conditions or other joint involved
conditions like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis.
So swimming is wonderful if you have access to a pool and of course in most places there
are public pools that you can gain access to for free.
Oftentimes it's not easy to get to a pool.
So another form that's really important to stress a form of exercise that basically everyone
really should consider doing as much as they can is resistance training, strength training,
lifting weights.
So resistance training is any muscular exercise, you know the classic form is lifting weights,
but you don't have to be a bodybuilder, you don't even have to join a gym to lift weights.
You can lift your own body weight by doing pushups and sit-ups and pull-ups.
You can get your own modest set of dumbbells to lift weights at home.
It's a good idea to get some instruction on how to do that properly if you have any arthritis
or other issues that might cause you to do such things improperly or stress your shoulders
or your back or your neck or other parts of your body.
But any kind of resistance training, incorporating some kind of resistance training into your
routine is really really important.
You may have heard there was a study that was on the radio on the news today, just published
in the Journal of American Cardiology based on an analysis of 400,000 adults, US adults
aged 27 to 61 over two decades.
So over two decades, especially about the benefits to women.
That benefits men and women both obviously, but especially women.
Aged 27 to 61, 400,000 adults, the women were 24% less likely than those who did not exercise
to experience death from any cause.
Men were 15% less likely.
Women also had a 36% reduced risk of a fatal heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular
event.
Women had a 14% reduced risk of a fatal heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular event
from exercising regularly.
And these are just statistics on people who did regular exercise, basically any form of
exercise.
But it gets even better.
The strength training, so the people who did any kind of strength training, resistance
training, lifting weights, using resistance bands, using your own body weight, the people
who participated in strength training exercises had a 19% reduced risk of death.
Women and 11% reduced death for men from any cause compared to those who didn't do strength
training.
So all cause of death was reduced by doing strength training exercises, 19% for women,
11% for men.
But here's the best part.
Women who did strength training saw an even greater reduced risk of cardiovascular deaths.
30%.
So women who do any kind of strength, regular strength training, there is a certain amount
that you have to do, but it's not big.
The details are in that study somewhere.
Email me if you want the exact details.
But it's just the typical recommendations that most people would do two or three days
a week.
I'll come back to that if we have time for it.
But basically 30% reduced risk of cardiovascular rate related deaths for women who did strength
training, any kind of resistance training, and an 11% reduction for men.
I'm Dr. Todd Benkley, and you're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to
Almost Any Health Challenge.
The subject of today's talk is cognitive impairment, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia.
Don't wait till it's too late.
That's the main message.
Most of the people who come to me with complaints of cognitive impairment, with memory loss,
with early signs of dementia, or especially advanced dementia, most people wait till it's
too late.
But the good news is, most people are familiar, and we have been talking about this today,
the benefits of exercise.
Anything you've ever heard that increases your heart health also increases your brain
health.
Your brain commands 20% of the output of your heart, 20% of the oxygen produced, delivered
to your body by the pump, goes to your brain.
Most dementia is vascular dementia.
There's a whole bunch of distinctions, different types of diagnoses for dementia, Lewy body
dementia, frontal lobe dementia, Alzheimer's being the most common.
There is one that's specifically called vascular dementia because of the effects of loss of
blood flow to the brain.
But from a functional medicine perspective, if you want to learn how to, so those distinctions
are important.
If you're going to use drugs, then those distinctions are important.
If you're going to use other forms of medical care as medical therapy advances, maybe those
distinctions will become even greater at some point.
But the bottom line is from a functional medicine perspective, it doesn't matter what kind of
dementia you have.
The problem is it's all vascular dementia.
All dementia is the loss of brain cells and very important specific parts of your brain,
the part of your brain where memories are filed and then stored, loss of total brain
mass in several parts, if not all parts of your brain.
And a lot of that is directly reduced to lack of circulation to the brain.
When you lose circulation to any part of your brain, you're going to lose brain cells and
that part of your brain is going to shrink and therefore that part of your brain is going
to stop working the way it used to.
And it's very difficult to fix that once it's gone beyond a certain stage.
This is why most medications for Alzheimer's don't work.
Aricept is the most famous one.
There are others in development all the time.
There's all kinds of research.
It's been progressing sort of for decades now that identify what actually causes the
damage to the brain, tau proteins, beta amyloid plaques, et cetera.
And there are drugs that have successfully removed the neurofibral tangles, the tau proteins,
the beta amyloid plaque and all the other, not all, several other things that have been
identified.
They've literally developed drugs that can remove these things that have been identified
in the brains of people who have Alzheimer's.
Unfortunately, they don't prove that until they only prove they're only able to document
that on autopsy after the person has died.
But the bad news is these drugs don't work.
They're not a cure.
They don't even reverse the disease.
They slow its progression slightly and they have side effects.
And the most recent one had such minor effects and was so ridiculously overpriced that even
the medical community, the neurological community cried foul.
And who knows what's going to go on with that?
I forget the name of that drug, but just look up most recent dementia drug and you can find
it.
But hopefully the point is don't wait till it's too late.
So when you are at the very beginning of showing any signs, it's important to do what you can,
get tested.
So here's a couple of things you can do.
First importantly, prevent it by just doing the basic things to keep yourself healthy.
Anything you know, as I said before, to keep your heart healthy will also keep your brain
healthier than it would otherwise be.
So keep the pipes clear, keep the pump strong, keep the pressure low.
There are some supplements that I recommend for everyone for general health, which includes
the brain.
The brain is the most sensitive organ to any organ in your body to nutrient deficiencies.
So the three things I recommend, anyone's supplement, even if we don't do any testing,
I can just tell you 99% chance you're not getting enough of this from your diet.
They are number one, vitamin D, 5,000 units of vitamin D is the standard dose for adults
to maintain a blood level of vitamin D that keeps all of your body systems working as
well as they should and as well as they could.
Most importantly, your immune system, the standard recommendations for vitamin D, barely
prevent rickets, they'll prevent your bones from collapsing.
They don't even effectively reduce your risk of osteoporosis.
They prevent rickets when you're a child and early adult.
But so yeah, 5,000 units of vitamin D is the standard dose.
Number two, fish oil.
So the omega-3 fatty acids that are only in the ocean, not the ones that are in plants,
there's no plant-based source, abundant plant-based source of EPA and DHA.
These are the omega-3s that only come from the oceans.
And you can only get them from fish or algae.
So if you want to supplement them, you can only get them from fish oil supplements or
algae oil supplements.
And those are super important.
25, your brain is made of fat, is mostly fat and water and some collagen, connective tissue,
mostly fat and water and 25% of the fat that makes up your brain is made from docosa hexanoic
acid, this omega-3 fatty acid that you can only get from the ocean.
And no one, unless you're going to eat a piece of salmon every day or some tuna, which you
shouldn't because of the mercury in the tuna, I recommend only eating tuna once a month
because there's a lot of mercury in tuna because it's a huge fish.
Or sardines are great.
Sardines and anchovies are small fish, so you can eat sardines every day if you really
like them.
I eat them two or three times a week because they're delicious, especially if you get the
ones that are packed in olive oil and put some capers on them or a little something
else for flavor.
But most people are not going to do that.
Most people are not going to eat oily fish every day.
And most other fish don't even, even if you eat a lot of fish, there's not that many fish
that have a lot of omega-3 fatty acids.
Obviously the only ones that have a lot are salmon, the only common ones are salmon, tuna,
anchovies and sardines.
There's a few others, but there's just not a lot of essential fatty acids, EPA and DHA,
the omega-3s you need for brain health, cardiovascular health, its anti-inflammatory effects and immune
system boosting effects.
Look up, if you do the, if you look on PubMed for all the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids,
all of those benefits are only for those two omega-3s you can really only get from the
ocean.
Number three, a good multivitamin.
So all of these reactions that have to take place to produce neurotransmitters and keep
every part of your body, including your brain functioning, require cofactors to drive those
chemical reactions.
And most of those cofactors are B vitamins and minerals.
So you can get B vitamins from food.
There's lots of good food sources for B vitamins like liver and whole grains and vegetables
in general and minerals.
So the main missing thing for most people is minerals.
Most people, I recommend a good multivitamin and mineral supplement.
How do you tell if one is good?
It should be at least two or three and preferably four capsules a day.
I've seen, I know of, I'm aware of a couple of good top quality, they're usually more
expensive multivitamins that are two huge tablets, two huge horse pills a day.
Most people have trouble taking things that are that big.
So four regular size capsules is what a good multivitamin usually looks like because the
plant-based forms of minerals that most of us don't get enough of in our diet are bulky.
They take up space.
They will not fit into a one-a-day multivitamin.
So do not take, please do not buy a one-a-day multivitamin anywhere.
It's mostly useless because it just doesn't have the types of nutrients that your body
absorbs well and not enough of them.
So if you want to prevent, do the best you can to reduce your risk of dementia and maintain
health, reduce your risk of all kinds of other diseases, but we're focusing on brain health
today, then take 5,000 units of vitamin D, about a gram and a half or maybe even twice
that depending on your age.
If you're already noticing some symptoms, if you already have cardiovascular disease,
if you're overweight, if you're over 60, maybe even over 50, I might recommend, or
if you have any familial history of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, strokes of dementia,
then I'd probably recommend you at least double that and take 3 grams, 3,000 milligrams combined
EPA and DHA.
So when you look at your labels, don't take just three grams of fish oil, but three grams
of EPA and DHA combined.
There are several other supplements that can help improve brain health to help reduce your
risk, reverse some of the damage.
We won't have time to go into all of those today, so I'll save those for next week, but
I did want in the time that we have left today to talk about another thing you can do that
might motivate you to take better care of yourself, and that is to get the APOE gene
test.
APOE, that's the gene test that measures your risk of Alzheimer's.
So ask your doctor to order the APOE gene test.
Most people have, it comes in three forms.
APOE gene comes in three forms, two, three, and four.
So the APOE-3 is the most common one, only about 5 to 10 percent, 5 to 10 percent of
people have the APOE-2 form, and it's believed to have some protection against the disease,
but it's rare.
And most commonly, people have the APOE-3 form, that's the most common form, and some
authors believe it has a neutral effect, some that it also confers some risk.
The worst one, of course, is APOE-4.
So having one of the APOE-4 genes increases your risk by something like fourfold, and
having two, we all have two of these APOE genes.
So if you have two APOE-4s, I know that's a bit of a mouthful, but also, basically,
if you have the number four version, two of those, then it increases your risk something
like tenfold.
So the research is constantly being updated on this, and I'll try and find the latest
statistics and review this on next week's episode as well.
I wanted to be sure and get it in today.
Get that gene test.
So ask your doctor if they'll order it.
If you have a family history of Alzheimer's, then that should be a good enough reason to
get them to order it, but of course, it's not routinely ordered.
Most doctors don't order it because gene tests are very expensive.
If I just send you to Quest or LabCorp to order that gene test, it's something like
seven or eight hundred dollars.
But there is good news.
If you've ever heard about 23andMe, most people have heard about the Ancestry.com and 23andMe
to find out your family history.
Ancestry does not, but 23andMe does do also health-related genes.
So for $150, you can get a panel of it.
I think it's over a dozen now, something maybe 14 really important gene tests done for $150.
I recommend everyone do this because it's such a great deal.
For $150, you can get thousands, literally thousands of dollars worth of gene tests,
including the Alzheimer's gene and genes that identify iron overload and clotting factors
that increase your increase your risk of heart attack and stroke and a whole bunch of other
really important gene tests.
And each one of these tests individually costs hundreds of dollars and you can get a good
slate of them, including the Alzheimer's gene, is worth it just to get the Alzheimer's test
for $150 from the health portion of 23andMe.
And when you get that test, it's important as with any gene test, it's important to know
that you can have two of the worst versions, the number four, and still not get Alzheimer's.
So genes are just important things to know about to motivate you, know your risk factors
and take better care of yourself.
They don't cause disease in and of themselves.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, you've been listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions.
Do something this weekend to be healthier than you were last weekend and please tune
in next Friday at 4pm.
Have a fantastic weekend.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4pm for Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The
Word KDAR.