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. Alzheimer's and other
forms of dementia are always a concern. It's
always a challenge. My constant challenge is
to remind people how important it is to prevent
those things. But what can you do to reduce your
risk of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia?
How can you identify your current risk? What
are the factors that are testable? So that you
can know how important it is for you to do something
now or earlier than others, perhaps. Everyone's
different. Not everyone is going to get Alzheimer's,
but far too many people do. And that's always,
well, often devastating, more so for the family
members of those who are affected by it than
the person themselves a lot of times. But what
if you've waited too long? What if you've already
been diagnosed or a loved one, your mother, your
father, your brother, sister, spouse has been
diagnosed and they can't prevent it. They've
already got it. What are you going to do then?
I'm very excited to report today that we're going
to talk about some new research that has shown
something other than the standard drugs that
often don't work at all or very little at best
to slow the disease. There is some exciting new
research on a common nutrient that can actually
is very promising for reducing and even reversing
the things that lead up to loss of memory and
ability to store new memories that we experience
as dementia. And there's a host of other nutrients
that everyone should be taking as they get older,
or at least test to make sure they're getting
sufficient amounts of in their diet to dramatically
reduce their risk of the devastating effects
of dementia. But before we get into some of these
specific nutrients that are often missing as
we get older and specific tests that you can
run to identify your risk factors, what's most
important, the starting point I always like to
have people consider is anything and everything
you've heard about reducing your risk of heart
disease, like exercising, eating a healthy diet,
and from any functional medicine practitioner,
getting those nutrients. But exercise, I'm going
to focus on the exercise first because that's...
A lot of people are surprised by that still.
Did you know that you can dramatically reduce
your risk of any chronic degenerative condition
of the brain? So Alzheimer's, all forms of dementia,
Parkinson's, and virtually any other condition
of the brain. Mood disorders, anxiety, depression,
schizophrenia, almost anything that affects your
brain is going to be at least in part as a result
of lack of circulation. decreasing circulation
of the brain, which results in a deficiency of
nutrients. Your circulation is what provides
nutrients to your brain, and your brain is the
most sensitive organ in the body to even slight
minor deficiencies in any nutrients. It's also
the most sensitive organ to even slight toxicities
of any kind, which we've talked about in previous
episodes. We'll come back to that. But let's
focus on exercise first. Here's a really exciting
article that just came out. Cycling in midlife.
tied to lower risk of dementia. So this is an
article that was published by Dr. Lingkai Chen
in JAMA, Journal of American Medical Association,
Network Open. And the title of the article is
Active Travel Mode and Dementia in Brain Structure.
So this is a study of 479 ,000 participants over
a 30 -year follow -up period. where they asked
everyone, how do you get around? How do you drive?
How much do you drive? How much do you take trains?
Do you ride your bike ever as transportation?
It's an interesting study because a lot of people
have an exercise bike or go to the gym and cycle
there or do a treadmill. But this was more interested
in, these authors were rightly interested in
people who are out moving their body through
space in a situation that requires, rapid response
and thinking. When you're outside riding your
bike, you're using your brain in ways that you're
not using your brain. If you're sitting in a
chair watching TV, obviously, but also if you're
at a gym riding a treadmill watching a movie,
that's not using your brain very much. You're
usually watching or listening to music. to distract
yourself from the otherwise irritating thoughts
that might be in your brain. So when you're out
on a road riding your bike, this was their idea.
What if we test this? Is it true? Could it be
true that when people are out riding their bike...
Does it reduce their risk of dementia and improve
their overall brain health? And the good news
is, yes, they found exactly that. So this is
pretty exciting news. It was data collected from
the UK Biobank, United Kingdom Biobank. This
is a research facility that collects data on
virtually every person in Britain. And this is
data that was collected over a four -year period
from 2006 to 2010. And then they analyzed the
data 10, 12 years later in October of 2024. And
they started out by basically asking them, how
do you get around, not to and from work, but
all other times? Do you drive? Do you take public
transportation? Do you walk? Do you ride your
bike? And they did MRI scans to measure the brain
structure of these folks and focusing on the
hippocampal. The hippocampus is a part of your
brain in the temple, inside, just inside each
ear. That is the critically important part for
you to store new memories. That is always damaged
when you have dementia. And so they measured
hippocampal volume, the volume of this part of
the brain that gets diminished when you have
dementia. And oftentimes, it's diminished 30%.
Most of the time when people notice any kind
of memory loss or other symptoms of dementia,
they've already lost 30 % of that part of the
brain. So in this study, they measured with MRI
scans the hippocampal volume, the part of the
brain that gets diminished with dementia. And
folks who did cycling or mixed cycling, mixed
cycling and walking, and the folks that did the
active forms of transportation, cycling and walking,
they were found to have a reduced risk of all
-cause dementia, including young -onset dementia,
late -onset dementia, and Alzheimer's dementia,
as well as an increase in hippocampal volume.
So this suggests that it's a very promising approach
for maintaining brain health. Cycling, especially
as a regular form of transport, increases blood
flow to the brain, reduces inflammation, and
stimulates neurogenesis, the regeneration of
new brain tissue. And it requires a higher cognitive
engagement. What does that mean? When you're
out riding your bike, it requires more work for
your brain to pay attention, to make sure you're
not going to get hit by a car, and that scares
a lot of people. There are ways for people at
any age to safely ride. their bike outdoors.
But no, it's not for everybody, but it's really
important. This is really exciting new research.
When you're out and about and you have to pay
attention to your surroundings and engage with
your environment in real time while your body
is in motion and your heart is pumping, flooding
your brain with all the nutrients that it needs,
it contributes to a preservation of the part
of your brain that shrinks. In absence of that
kind of activity, the main part of the brain,
the hippocampus that shrinks when people get
dementia, is preserved. And likely, other research,
what I'm going to get to here in a minute, is
showing that you can even increase it with doing
this type of activity. I'm Dr. Todd Bankley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural
Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge. Today
we're talking about Alzheimer's and how you can
identify your risk factors. And one of the most
important tests anyone can do to identify their
risk of getting Alzheimer's is the APOE gene
test. It's a little bit of a mouthful, but it's
a common gene test, A -P -O -E. And there are
four variants of this gene. And so you want to
know, do you have the APOE2, 3, or 4? And you
have two of each. So the highest risk is if you
have two of the four APOE4 versions. It's a little
technical. Interestingly, so it's about, I actually
can run this test for you. Anybody who wants
to run that, it's still kind of expensive. At
LabCorp, current price, I just checked it yesterday,
LabCorp charges $337 for this gene test. And
some people are excited about the gene tests
offered by, private companies like 23andMe. It's
been in the news a lot lately. 23andMe is going
through bankruptcy now and somebody is trying
to buy it. And I also heard more recently that
the original developer of the jean... test program
is also trying to buy it. And I went on their
website. I did it. I've encouraged a lot of my
patients to do it because for $149, you can get
the APOE gene test, which costs $337 out of pocket
anywhere else or more, and a dozen or more other
gene tests, which adds up to thousands of dollars
worth of tests you get for $149. So if you're
not too worried about that, 23andMe website is
still up. You can still go and order. That health
gene test profile, it includes tests for clotting
factors and a whole host of other things. Hemochromatosis,
an iron overload disorder that comes up a lot.
You know, some people are worried about, well,
what are they going to do with my genetic material?
Well, who knows? But I think anyone could probably
run a pretty good campaign to crack down on them
if they did abuse it. And so far, everything
has been fine. But anyway, it's really important
to know. Why is it important to know? If you
have the APOE gene, because if you have the APOE4
gene, you have a 10 % 10 times 10, 10 fold increased
risk of dementia. And if you have the APO4 gene
times two, if you have two of those, the risk
is 25 fold increased risk for those people. It's
really important to really be really careful
about doing contact sports like boxing and football
and soccer. And even young people that have that
gene, there is data to show that they can reduce
their risk. It's actually important for anyone
that's going to do sports that involves a risk
of getting your head bumped to take some anti
-inflammatory nutrients like turmeric or even,
you know, worst case scenario, just take ibuprofen
to reduce the inflammation that will occur if
you hit your head because even a slight bump
dramatically increases your risk cumulatively.
of getting dementia. So the study that I just
cited about the effects of cycling, they did
test that on APOE4 carriers, and it didn't have
a strong... effect on those people because they
have the highest risk. But there is a current
study going on at the Cleveland Clinic right
now, the CYCLE -AD trial, and early reports show
that sedentary carriers of the APOE4 gene experienced
more significant declines in episodic memory
and the hippocampal volume, the part of the brain
that's so important in dementia, than carriers
of the same gene who engaged in moderate physical
activity. suggesting that activities like cycling
indoors or outdoors may enhance the functional
and structural integrity of this critical important
part of the brain. Well, here's another exciting
study. Various travel modes involve different
attention, engagement, and spatial navigation
abilities. So what does that mean? Well, this
is research that was done by Dr. Jenna, MD, PhD
of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General
Hospital in Boston, published in December 2024
in the British Medical Journal. A recent study
of workers in hundreds of occupations found that
those who used real -time spatial and navigational
processing skills the most notably taxi and ambulance
drivers, the people that were driving taxis and
ambulances out in the environment where they're
having to respond in real time to a whole bunch
of stimuli. These folks had the lowest portion
of deaths due to Alzheimer's disease. This was
an analysis of death certificates in the U .S.
of nearly 9 million people who had died with
occupational information that allowed them to
determine this in 3 .88%. had Alzheimer's disease
listed as the cause of death. But only 1 % of
taxi drivers and only 0 .74 % of ambulance drivers
had died from Alzheimer's disease. Equally interestingly,
this was a study of occupational information
for over 400 different types of work and other
transportation -related jobs that didn't require
as much real -time spatial and navigational processing,
such as bus drivers, for example. but they don't
have to pay attention as much as taxi and ambulance
drivers. They ranked 263rd out of, I think it
was 433 occupations. So the hippocampus is the
brain reason used to create these cognitive spatial
maps. What is a cognitive spatial map? When you
drive to and from some place regularly, you form...
a map of your world, just driving to and from
work, the places that you drive all the time,
you eventually get to a point where you don't
even have to think about where you're going.
You can just get in the car and go and you'll
eventually get there. And so these are spatial
maps that we record in our brain. And ambulance
drivers and taxi drivers have to have a lot more
of those than most people because they're going
to a lot of different places all the time and
quickly and under pressure. And so it requires,
the point of this is not everyone's going to,
it's not like everyone needs to become a taxi
driver or an ambulance driver to reduce their
brain risk of dementia. The point is understanding
that when you use your brain in real time situations
that require you to react in time. and process
a lot of information and you do that over and
over and over again, that's going to do much
more to maintain your brain health than playing
Sudoku or doing the crossword. Other studies
have shown similarly that, for example, speaking
in public or going to a movie with friends and
then talking about something controversial afterwards.
Basically anything that requires you to think
on your feet, to be a little bit uncomfortable.
to stretch your boundaries a little bit and react
in real time, not in necessarily dangerous ways,
especially as you get older, there's easy ways
to do this. Basically, just by talking, that's
one of the best examples. And there's good data
to show this too. Just put yourself in an environment
where you have to think on your feet, where someone's
going to ask you a question and you have to respond
right now. Go to a Toastmasters group. If you've
never been to a Toastmasters group, this is the
public speaking organization that trains people.
If you're, if public speaking, Speaking terrifies
you. Some people say it's the number one fear
more than snakes or dying even. It's a really
supportive group where you go and everyone else
is there for the same reason to get over the
fear of public speaking. And it makes it really
easy to develop the skills. And every time you're
too... to your level of comfort. Sometimes the
first few times you just show up, but eventually
you gradually increase your comfort level with
speaking extemporaneously, speaking on your feet,
speaking about something off the cuff. That uses
huge amounts of brain connectivity. It maintains
the connections between the remaining nerve cells
in your brain so that they continue to work for
the rest of your life and dramatically reduce
your risk of dementia. I'm Dr. Todd Bankley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural
Solutions to almost any health challenge. Today,
we're talking about how to reduce your risk and
identify your risk of Alzheimer's and other forms
of dementia. Anything you do regularly that requires
you to think on your feet in real time increases
the hippocampal volume in your brain. The hippocampus
is the part of your brain that records new memories
and figures out where to store them. This is
the part of the brain that most often gets destroyed
by Alzheimer's. So that's why people who have
dementia... can experience something, and then
five minutes later they don't remember it. We,
most people who have normal brain function, experience
the world as we see something, we automatically
remember it. It's a one -step process. You see
something, of course you just saw that, so of
course you remember it. But in fact, the recording
of memory is at least, always at least, a two
-step process. A memory comes in, it has to go
through the hippocampus, and the hippocampus
is the part of the brain. that decides where
to store that memory. It wants to categorize
it and put it in a specific box, someplace where
it can find it again later. That's the part of
the brain that gets destroyed, that switching
station. And that's why people with dementia
can see something, hear something, experience
something, and then five minutes later not remember
it because the part of the brain that... is required
to store that memory is gone or dramatically
diminished. And it's also why those same people
can remember things that happened 10, 20, 50
years ago. They can remember what happened then
because those memories were successfully stored.
The problem is it's difficult to store new memories
because the loss of this critical part of the
brain called the hippocampus. So we talked about
how taxi drivers have better capacity to Taxi
drivers themselves have been shown to have larger
hippocampal volume. The part of their brain,
this hippocampus, is larger than others. Another
study research led by Eleanor McGuire, Ph .D.
of the University College of London, showed several
years ago that taxi drivers had significantly
larger hippocampus volume than others who were
similar in age, education, and intelligence.
Well, more recently, in a study published in
the Current Biology Journal, In December 2011,
Drs. Catherine Woollett and Eleanor McGuire,
Ph .D. in London, showed that London cabbie,
they talked about how London cabbie drivers must
pass this rigorous test called the knowledge.
So the knowledge that any London cabbie driver
must pass this test requires them to know the
irregular layout of about 25 ,000 streets within
a six mile radius. of the Charing Cross train
station, which is the exact geographic center
of London. And they have to know the locations
of thousands of places. So this spatial learning,
known as the knowledge, takes several years to
learn. And when Drs. McGuire and colleagues examined
the brains of 79 taxi drivers before and after,
they spent three or four years preparing for
this test. Those who successfully passed the
test had an increase in gray matter volume in
the posterior hippocampus and changes to their
memory profile compared with control. So what
does that mean? The people who had to take this
test and memorize all this spatial information
to know where they were in any part of London
at any time and know where most of the major
locations the people would want to go to when
they get into a cab in the center of London.
These people had significantly larger hippocampus
the critical part of the brain than others who
didn't so i mentioned at the top of the show
today that there is exciting new research on
what can you do it's all good and well i'm always
telling people you know please exercise get yourself
tested move your body take some nutrients make
sure that your blood pressure is controlled and
you're keeping your heart strong and you're keeping
your pipes clear to keep the blood flowing prevent
plaques from forming prevent risk of heart disease
and stroke, anything you do like that is going
to reduce your risk of all forms of dementia.
Most forms of dementia are caused in part, if
not mostly, by lack of circulation, by a loss
of oxygen, by slow degeneration of that tissue
from that loss of circulation, loss of oxygen
supply, loss of essential nutrients. So, that's
all well and good, but what do you do if you've
already been diagnosed? What if you already have
Alzheimer's or your loved one has been diagnosed
with Alzheimer's? So, this is a really exciting
study published in the Alzheimer's Research Journal
Translational Research and Clinical Interventions
in May 2025, just last month. It's a small study.
20 Alzheimer's patients, 60 and up, on medication,
the standard medications for Alzheimer's, who
received 20 grams a day of creatine. powder.
Creatine powder is well known among the exercise
community. This is the amino acid that is very
helpful for building muscle mass. So a lot of
bodybuilders take creatine powder. This study
used a dose of 20 grams a day split into two
doses for eight weeks. And after they did this,
they proved number one, that the serum creatinine
values went up from 0 .6 to 15 milligrams. per
deciliter. This is reported by Matthew Taylor,
PhD of the University of Kansas Medical Center
in Kansas City and his colleagues. So number
one, they proved that taking this did actually
improve, dramatically improve, 15 -fold or 30
-fold nearly increase in the serum levels of
creatine when they took the creatine powder.
But more importantly, the secondary outcome that
they were really going for is the total creatinine
in the brain increased by 11%. And this was determined
by a special form of MRI called a magnetic resonance
spectroscopic imaging, MRSI. This is a special
test for imaging things in the brain. And they
also showed with a number of metrics that cognition
improved on several components of the standard
National Institutes of Health toolbox. cognition
battery. And this is just a group of tests that
are used to measure total cognition, fluid cognition,
list sorting, oral reading, and inhibitory control
and attention. That's kind of a mouthful, but
these are just basic ways through interviewing
a patient in the office or questionnaires to
measure their ability to use their brain. These
were all improved by taking creatine. Well, why
is that? Well, creatine helps boost metabolism
by regenerating ATP, which is a key step in energy
production, and the mitochondria, the energy
-producing fuel cell in every cell in the body,
including the brain. And impaired brain metabolism,
including dysfunction in the creatinine system,
likely plays a role in Alzheimer's disease. That's
what this research is showing. It also might
just help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress,
which there's lots of nutrients that also help
do that. But it's really important. So the new
research that's very exciting is creatine powder
can very likely reduce your risk of dementia.
But it's important to not go out and buy creatine
supplements that are full of sugar and stimulants
like the junk that a lot of bodybuilders take,
the stuff that they sell at most stores. Creatine
doesn't taste delicious by itself, so most of
these products add sugar, artificial sweeteners
that are not good for you, and stimulants, just
caffeine or ephedra, guarana, a whole host of
other things that you definitely don't want.
Just get the creatine itself. If you're wondering
where a good place to get it is, email me, and
I'll tell you we are running out of time. Thanks
again for tuning in. I'm very excited about this
new research for preventing and possibly even
reversing. Alzheimer's. Have an excellent weekend.
I look forward to speaking with you again right
here next Friday at 2 p .m. 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 2 p .m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions
here on 98. 3 FM, The Word.