Latest / Create The Best Me / Prevent Dementia and Boost YOUR Brain Health
Transcript
- 0:00Do you often wonder if your brain fog could be early signs of dementia?
- 0:06I know this thought has crossed my mind many times.
- 0:09Today's guests are going to blow your mind because they're talking about the brain, how to keep it sharp, and the surprising daily habits that might be dimming your mental spark.
- 0:23Joining us are the dynamic duels, Dr.
- 0:26Emily and Mitchell Clionsky, who are not just partners in life, but they're also in the fight against cognitive decline.
- 0:35They're here to share insights from their groundbreaking book, Dementia Prevention: Using Your Head to Save Your Brain.
- 0:44And trust me, by the end of this episode, you'll look at your daily routine in a whole new light.
- 0:52Now, let's get into it because what you will learn here today is nothing short of hope for your brain health.
- 1:01Let's roll.
- 1:03Hello and welcome to Create the Best Me.
- 1:05Today on the show, we have Mitch and Emily Clionsky.
- 1:10Welcome to the show.
- 1:12Hi there, Carmen.
- 1:14Thanks for having us.
- 1:16And you guys are the authors of an amazing book.
- 1:21It is about dementia prevention.
- 1:24Which I think is very important, especially because my audience is women in midlife.
- 1:31And we go through what many of us call brain fog.
- 1:35And so tell us about your book before we get into everything.
- 1:40Mitch, why don't you start?
- 1:41Love that.
- 1:42Just sort of hand it off like that.
- 1:44Absolutely.
- 1:46So, dementia prevention is a really important topic because one out of two cases of dementia can be prevented.
- 1:55So we wanted to put together a compendium of information by sampling from all of the different areas that impact dementia.
- 2:06And there are about 25 different factors, all of which can play a role in someone's dementia risk.
- 2:13And we wanted to get past the headlines, the gotchas, the clickbait that you often see where eat this, take that, this will help, that won't help, kind of things on the internet to give some real science, but to then translate that science into language that everybody understands, just the same way when we see patients in our office.
- 2:39Emily's a physician, internal medicine doctor and a psychiatrist.
- 2:43I'm a clinical neuropsychologist.
- 2:46We want, when the people sit in front of us, we talk to them for them to really appreciate what's going on with them, what they can do to make a difference.
- 2:55And so the whole idea of the book is to pull that together, to give everyone who reads it a guideline for things that they can do to make a better self and to protect their brains going into the future.
- 3:08Yeah, and this particular topic it hits my heart so hard because my maternal grandfather, developed Alzheimer's.
- 3:18It's interesting because he started to show signs of, cognitive issues right around the time he decided to retire.
- 3:26Or was forced to retire.
- 3:27So it was, he was less active.
- 3:29And, when he passed, he didn't even know who a lot of us were, except for some of the people like my mom, people from way deep into the past.
- 3:38So this particular topic, like I said, is so important to me because I fear that, it came from my maternal grandfather had Alzheimer's.
- 3:49And the reality, almost every one of us is touched by someone in our lives, grandparents, or our own parents, like my mom, or our siblings.
- 4:03All of us know someone who's had a mental deterioration in their thinking, in their memory, in their ability to care for themselves.
- 4:13And it's a growing problem because people keep living longer.
- 4:17This is a disease of aging.
- 4:19And so when you see the statistics going up and why it becomes a bigger problem for us, both personally, but also as a society is because there's just more of us who are going to be exposed to this risk rather than dying before we get it.
- 4:33So if we're going to live a long time, we want to live the best lives we can up to the very end.
- 4:39So in other words, aging is the greatest risk that we all have for dementia.
- 4:45Yeah, and I always look at aging, because my stepfather died at the age of 52 due to esophageal cancer.
- 4:54Oh, that's so young.
- 4:55I always say that getting old is a gift.
- 5:00But then that gift comes with that risk and that risk is your brain starts to develop deterioration due to dementia, alzheimer's.
- 5:14What was the other one?
- 5:15Well, dementia is a big category alzheimer's is a form of dementia.
- 5:20Vascular dementia is the form of dementia.
- 5:23You get dementias due to parkinson's disease.
- 5:26Dementias due to lewy bodies.
- 5:28Dementias due to hitting your head too many times.
- 5:30Dementias due to drinking too much alcohol.
- 5:34Not getting enough exercise.
- 5:38Getting an infectious disease.
- 5:40There are about four hundred causes of dementia, at least.
- 5:45Well, we have to really look at the person as a whole before figuring out where you can improve things to reduce your risk.
- 5:53And I also, the part that really resonated with me in your book, because like I said, the women that most on my show caters to women in midlife.
- 6:02You talked about as we start going into menopause or we start hitting those menopausal years, premenopause, menopause, or postmenopause, our estrogen level starts to deplete and that causes memory issues.
- 6:21Huge changes, absolutely.
- 6:25And we didn't have a lot of documentation.
- 6:28We didn't have a lot of research and we still don't have enough research about how that estrogen pause really affects our brains.
- 6:38But this much we do know for sure, Carmen, that when we begin to go through pre-menopause now in the United States at the age of 42, it used to be 52, it's now 42.
- 6:54We begin to have changes, not just in our body, in our cross-linking of our collagen in our face.
- 7:02And in how well our airway muscles respond to keeping our airway open when we're sleeping at night.
- 7:11And how fast we accumulate clots and garbage and plaque in our heart vessels and our brain vessels.
- 7:19But our actual cells are taking a toll, are paying the toll, a price for the fact that they don't have enough estrogen because estrogen actually affects how all of our brain cells manufacture new parts, new receptors, and can actually build new connections.
- 7:41So it's vitally important for every woman to learn as much as she can about how to optimize her brain health well before she hits premenopause.
- 7:53Because when we go into premenopause, we really want to be geared up for doing everything we possibly can through those next 10 to 20 critical years.
- 8:05And It does make a huge difference.
- 8:08One of the things that I always like that when you have talked to me about this, because I didn't understand this part of it, is how it affects also the muscles in your neck and how that affects how you're breathing when you're sleeping, which is something I think that most people never pay attention to.
- 8:24Right.
- 8:24And this is another female issue that I have a real problem with, medicine today.
- 8:31We are still not recognizing the fact that women develop obstructive sleep apnea.
- 8:37We still tend to think of that condition, which is when we're sleeping our airways collapse and we don't get enough air down into our lungs, so we don't get enough oxygen into our brains.
- 8:51And if you deprive your brain of oxygen, your brain cells will die.
- 8:56I guarantee it.
- 8:58So the important thing is first of all, women are ignored in a lot of respects by modern medicine.
- 9:07And we don't have doctors still convinced that we have things like atherosclerosis at a rate that's just as high as men.
- 9:17Obstructive sleep apnea that's very, very potentially fatal.
- 9:22And so, even if we are not overweight, even if we don't have a thick neck, Even if we don't have high blood pressure, even if we don't have PCOS or polycystic ovary syndrome.
- 9:40Even if we don't have any of those kind of health conditions, we can still be thin, be a nice little size six or eight and still have obstructive sleep apnea.
- 9:52Then when we are deprived of our estrogen in our 40s, what happens is our airway muscles actually change how they are tethered.
- 10:04In other words, how they're situated in our body and they lose their resilience and we develop a much higher rate of obstructive sleep apnea.
- 10:16And doctors are still ignoring that.
- 10:19Mitch what's that study where they pointed out in JAMA?
- 10:23Where women who had obstructive sleep apnea and were identified as having obstructive sleep apnea had a delayed onset of dementia when compared to women who did not have their obstructive sleep apnea corrected So you're talking about the I think the, Ancoli Israel study?
- 10:42Yes And basically what they found was it took a group of women who had mild cognitive impairment.
- 10:47In other words who were on the verge of developing dementia and they pulled out of this the women who had sleep apnea of which there were a lot because it's a very high correlation very high co-morbidity.
- 11:00And then half of them got treated for their sleep apnea so, that they would now not be stopping their breathing while they're sleeping and the other group that were not treated and when they compared the two, the ones who were treating their sleep apnea, we're at mild cognitive impairment for a long, long time.
- 11:19And the ones who did not treat it progressed into dementia just a couple of years later.
- 11:24So it becomes a really important factor.
- 11:26It's one of the aspects of the model that we put together that most of the people, despite all the research out there, don't include when looking at what contributes to their risk.
- 11:39But in my practice, it is a huge issue and we get people tested all the time.
- 11:45And 70 to 80 percent of the people come in to see me end up having sleep disorder breathing.
- 11:52We fixed that a lot of good things happen.
- 11:55You have more energy, you sleep more continuously through the night.
- 11:59You spend more time in stage three sleep where all of the cleaning out of the waste products of thinking during the day, because we think it's electrochemical process, it creates byproducts.
- 12:13Well, there's a process that happens while we sleep that cleans that out it's called the glymphatic system.
- 12:20And if you're not down in deep sleep long enough, there's not enough time for that to occur.
- 12:25It doesn't occur correctly.
- 12:26So there's a lot of stuff with this whole sleep brain breathing connection.
- 12:30Right.
- 12:31Turns out to be really important.
- 12:33One of the interesting things that I found was that, as I mentioned, I went to medical school a little later than most people.
- 12:41I started at 41, 42.
- 12:45So I was much older than everybody else in my class.
- 12:50When I got out of medical school, I felt like I had somebody gave my brain a facelift, because all of a sudden I was thinking and having to work harder intellectually than I ever had to before in my life.
- 13:05But it was a very challenging thing.
- 13:07So I happily go on through my residencies and I get into my late 50s, and all of a sudden in the afternoon, after seeing patients around three o'clock in the afternoon, I'm starting to fall asleep in front of my computer screen.
- 13:22And I'm nodding off and I'm half the time, not remembering stuff that Mitch has told me.
- 13:28Or I'm going to the grocery store and I can only remember three out of six things I'm supposed to get.
- 13:34And I'm forgetting words that I learned in medical school that described conditions or diagnostics or treatments.
- 13:45That was terrifying.
- 13:49So the good news was that I was treating patients for this condition and it finally occurred to me that despite the fact that I didn't have high blood pressure, that I wasn't overweight, but I sure as heck was postmenopausal, I ought to have a sleep study.
- 14:09And sure enough, I had moderate obstructive sleep apnea.
- 14:15I went on continuous positive airway pressure, just like I put my patience on it, and within about a six month period, I actually lost a few pounds without trying.
- 14:29I wasn't needing to take naps in the afternoon.
- 14:32I wasn't cranky and as depressed as I had been.
- 14:37And I was certainly more alert and I was back to my normal feeling like I was 40, 45 again, except now I was in my early 60s.
- 14:47So it's something I really took away from my own experience.
- 14:52But the wives of all the people who are coming in to see me, their husbands had obstructive sleep apnea.
- 14:58Generally these women were the same generation that their husband was; I was diagnosing the husband with obstructive sleep apnea and helping his cognition come back to normal, but it occurred to me, who's taking care of these women?
- 15:14And the brighter women, of course said, hey, could you send me for a sleep study?
- 15:19And sure enough, consistent with some of the data that has been since published, when you get above the age of 70, one out of two people who have no symptoms of this condition actually have obstructive sleep apnea.
- 15:37And it's one of the most guaranteed ways to develop dementia, is to leave it untreated.
- 15:42So Emily, tell me, because you are a medical doctor, why aren't doctors Asking the questions or even just making it part of like a blood exam?
- 15:55Let's go send you to get a sleep test.
- 15:57Why?
- 15:57Why aren't they doing this?
- 15:59Because, you know, to be blunt about it, they're not paid to do that.
- 16:04We used to think in terms of quality of medicine 30 years ago, certainly 40 years ago.
- 16:13Then we had an evolution in medicine where insurance companies took control of our healthcare system and they were primarily interested in the bottom line.
- 16:24And so doctors had to even be incentivized by Medicare to keep track of blood pressure.
- 16:31One of the most fundamental things, one of the most fundamental factors that actually affect our brains as well as our hearts and our kidneys.
- 16:41Well, lots of studies have demonstrated that so long as you are paying doctors in this country and other countries, by the way.
- 16:48This is just not an American problem.
- 16:50So long as you incentivize doctors financially to do something, they will do it.
- 16:56Stop the financial incentive and their change in practice goes away.
- 17:01They will stop doing whatever you were incentivizing.
- 17:05So the government really had to take, a strong, beat them over the head approach to checking on things like blood pressure, cholesterol, urging mammograms, in men, or in fact, both, genders urging colonoscopies.
- 17:25But doctors don't really feel comfortable with the connections between, say, obstructive sleep apnea and dementia for one thing, to speak directly to that point.
- 17:36They're not aware of it and they're not compensated or rewarded for identifying it.
- 17:43And it takes time to treat.
- 17:45Yeah, and like you mentioned, you know, it almost seems like to me that the only people that are maybe getting the attention that maybe you need to take a sleep study test is, yes, men, but also people who look unhealthy, people that have thicker necks or are on the BMI scale show that they're obese or morbidly obese.
- 18:07But people that look like me or you are being ignored because, oh, they're healthy.
- 18:14They're not taking any medication, they're healthy, they're good.
- 18:18I think it's perhaps one or two other factors.
- 18:20No, please.
- 18:22A couple of them are governmentally related.
- 18:25For example, you may not know this, but the doctor who orders your sleep study can't do the sleep study, can't interpret the sleep study, and can't give you the equipment to treat your sleep apnea.
- 18:35To avoid doctors refer it to themselves, essentially setting up a little testing and treatment mill, the government, primarily Medicare, but rolled down into the other ones, has separated those functions.
- 18:48So if you're a doctor who wants to give someone a sleep study, especially before the days of home sleep tests, where you get them essentially through the mail, you have to refer them out to a sleep medicine specialist.
- 18:59So you have to wait for there to be a space available for an overnight sleep study in their lab.
- 19:05Not such a big issue now, but even so, that's then going to go out to a specialist who's connected with a sleep study to read it.
- 19:13then you're going to have to get a vendor who's going to give the CPAP machine.
- 19:19But the other thing is too, you're probably going to have a long discussion and perhaps a struggle with your patient.
- 19:27Because when I send people for sleep studies and they come back positive, where we talk about the results, I've got to really sell them on doing something which they never grew up expecting or hoping to do.
- 19:41Gee, can I get old enough I can wear something over my nose while I sleep at night?
- 19:45Nobody was ever born wanting to grow up with a piece of plastic on their face.
- 19:49So we have to really explain why this is important and why it will reduce the risk of strokes and heart attacks and erectile dysfunction, while it's going to give them more energy, while they're going to sleep through the night.
- 20:02It's a long sell and there's still this back and forth kind of thing and a lot of work to do, which is why of the people who are diagnosed with sleep apnea and prescribed CPAP, only 40 percent stick with it.
- 20:16And that's the problem, most people don't.
- 20:20And so there's too much work involved.
- 20:22So if you don't, if it's not going to smack you in the face, if you don't absolutely have to do it and you've got maybe four other medical conditions you're treating, you may not do that.
- 20:31Unfortunately, what a lot of people don't appreciate is that lack of oxygen in your brain causes your blood pressure to be high, causes your cholesterol to be high, causes you to become diabetic, causes the inflammation associated with obesity and causes excess weight on your body, as well as affects your kidneys.
- 20:59Causes you to need to take more medicines because you're getting up in the middle of the night peeing, and you don't want to do that, so you take a medicine for that, and disrupts your sleep, so you have an abnormal sleep architecture, so you start taking the over the counter Tylenol PMs to go to sleep.
- 21:22And then don't have a normal sleep architecture to begin with.
- 21:27So it's a vicious, vicious circle.
- 21:30And oh, by the way, for 70 percent of women who were depressed, it could have been addressed by addressing their sleep apnea.
- 21:39Yeah.
- 21:40Yeah.
- 21:40And another thing, because my husband complains about this, and he has valid reason to complain, because I've woken up because of this.
- 21:49I've heard myself snore.
- 21:51I have woken myself up because I'm snoring which is weird.
- 21:57But he, he'll sometimes tell me it's like, oh, you snored a lot last night.
- 22:01And so when I was reading your book, I noticed that, that that was kind of an indication, you know, you might have sleep apnea.
- 22:09Highly probable.
- 22:11Forget this might stuff.
- 22:13Highly probable.
- 22:15Can you talk a little bit about why people snore so that people can understand the correlation here?
- 22:24And I want to make a small adjustment to Emily's statistics earlier, that 50 percent likelihood actually begins at age 58, not at age 70.
- 22:31That's right.
- 22:32You're right.
- 22:3258.
- 22:33Yeah, this past summer there was a big study published 6,000 people from the general population ages 58 and older.
- 22:40So we're talking about an even younger group and a higher probability than anyone imagined.
- 22:45Why do you stop?
- 22:46Why do you snore?
- 22:47Well, imagine you somebody stuck an oboe down your throat.
- 22:50Your throat essentially becomes like a woodwind instrument.
- 22:53It's to read, vibrating as it's partially closed.
- 22:57And the air passes in and out.
- 23:00And then there's the times when you stop breathing entirely because your airway closes and you're not snoring, you do this instead, you do this.
- 23:10If that's a familiar sound, you've stopped breathing.
- 23:13And part of the reason why you do that is your brain is sitting there saying, I need oxygen! I need oxygen! I need oxygen! So you may have been in a very deep sleep when your brain finally sat there and said, she's starving me of oxygen.
- 23:31Brain, I got to get more O2.
- 23:34So the brain tells the heart work really, really fast.
- 23:38Start pumping the blood really, really fast.
- 23:40And the brain, also releases all kinds of chemicals and it causes you to come up out of the deep stage of sleep into a more superficial stage of sleep where you are then aware of the fact that you're snoring and it allows some bit of control more to come back into those muscles so that they can open a bit more and you can get some air in there.
- 24:07So when are you getting your sleep study, Carmen?
- 24:10Yeah.
- 24:11I don't know, I, because I was just taking, I was writing notes as I was reading your book.
- 24:16So I could read the book faster, but I wanted to make sure that I actually absorbed the information.
- 24:21So I was doing notes or just taking notes.
- 24:24And so I told my husband, I said, hey, how many times do you get up to go potty at night?
- 24:30And I said, because according to the doctor's book, it references that your brain is sending another message when it's not causing you to do that loud noise.
- 24:43Now talk about that.
- 24:45Well, remember when I said the brain is desperately needing oxygen.
- 24:49Well, the way it gets the oxygen is that it needs to get more blood.
- 24:55The way the brain gets more blood is to tell the heart to pump faster.
- 25:00So that message gets sent to the heart, the heart is squeezing more rapidly and at some point stretches the walls, the muscles in the top part of the heart called the atrium.
- 25:16When those muscles stretch, they release a hormone called Atrial Natriuretic Peptide or ANP.
- 25:26ANP makes you pee.
- 25:29It literally takes blood, because your heart thinks it's in fluid overload, because there's so much fluid in your heart at that point.
- 25:37So it takes that blood, and as it's passing through the kidney, makes you create more urine at a time of the night when you're not supposed to be doing that.
- 25:48So that fills up your bladder.
- 25:50Fills up your bladder and you gotta go pee.
- 25:52Then you come back to bed and then an hour or two later, same thing happens and you've had a sip of water, maybe, and you say, how's that possible?
- 25:59Where's that coming from?
- 26:00Where's that water coming from?
- 26:01Coming from you.
- 26:03Yeah, And that could happen we see people all the time, three, four times, five times a night, that they're up and going to the bathroom.
- 26:11And funny thing is when they treat the sleep apnea, they go back to having, oh, maybe an awakening per night.
- 26:18So they actually would start getting more sleep.
- 26:20Right.
- 26:20So this is all interwoven.
- 26:23The other interesting thing about it is that while there's not a lot of science about this, there are a few interesting studies that have demonstrated that women who have nocturia, which is a technical term for having to get up and go pee in the middle of the night.
- 26:39Women who have that bladder problem at night, if that's not corrected, it will be more likely to lead to overactive bladder problems during the day.
- 26:50which we're predisposed to anyway particularly if someone's had a vaginal delivery of a child.
- 26:58And so then you go to your doctor, urologist, and gynecologist, you say, man I got overactive bladder.
- 27:05And the doctor says, here's a pill that's going to tighten your bladder so that you're not having accidents.
- 27:14And you say great, and your brain is likely saying not so fast this medication you're giving me is Anticholinergic.
- 27:25This Ditropan, this Detrol, this Oxybutynin this is lowering the central levels of acetylcholine in my brain and therefore it's making me a little stupider.
- 27:39It's making me not as able to think because we want to keep those acetylcholine levels up as high as possible.
- 27:45And three out of the four medications that we've used for dementia for the past 25 years do exactly that.
- 27:52They keep those levels up.
- 27:54So now we're pushing down levels that we're trying to keep up.
- 27:58And so now you've got another problem, not only are you still getting up three times, but you're not wetting the bed.
- 28:03You're getting up because you're tighter in your bladder because that's working.
- 28:07But also, it's contributing to your lower acetylcholine as is the sweet medication you're taking as maybe three or four other medicines that you're taking for allergies or for your heart or for your depression or any number of things.
- 28:23And so there's this thing called the anticholinergic burden that is a cumulative kind of thing where these each add up and we'll suppress how your brain is working.
- 28:34And so sometimes the deprescribing of things that people are taking over the counter, particularly, really improves how people think.
- 28:43And it's related to how they sleep, which is related to how they breathe.
- 28:49Interesting kind of stuff where this is really quite a complex, but interesting kind of phenomenon.
- 28:55And women can have alternative ways of addressing that nocturnal problem in addition to getting their obstructive sleep apnea treated, which they absolutely need to do; when you have relaxation of the pelvic floor muscles, there are specific treatments that don't need to be medication based to help that.
- 29:16We didn't have them 10 years ago.
- 29:18We've got them today, and so whether it's a physical therapy approach, whether it's electrical stimulation approach, whether it's cognitive behavioral therapy, in addition to both of those two physical approaches.
- 29:32These things really are treatable, in addition to which one can consider, unless you've had breast cancer or some kind of reproductive organ cancer.
- 29:43An estrogen replacement that can be put in every 90 days will protect you against urinary tract infections that we're more prone to when we're postmenopausal anyway and will actually help with the urinary incontinence problem.
- 30:00It's all tied together.
- 30:01And there's also a couple of medications which work on the peripheral acetylcholine but are not so much involved in your brain's acetylcholine levels.
- 30:12So there are some other alternatives that your urologist, even if you didn't want to go to the behavioral route Right or the hormonal route, they could just switch you from one medication.
- 30:21There's two of them that are out there that are lower in this, that may do the same job for your bladder and do an easier task on your brain.
- 30:30I had a child older in life, I gave birth to my daughter when I was 40, cause I hit the reset button, decided to have more children.
- 30:37And after having her, I had bladder issues and I kind of thought, oh, I'm going to let my body adjust.
- 30:43So I waited about three years.
- 30:45My body didn't adjust.
- 30:46I had bladder issues.
- 30:49And so I went to my urologist and my first thought, was, I'm going to take a pill.
- 30:55And he was against that.
- 30:56He said, you're too young.
- 30:58He says, it will solve the problem, but it'll create a mountain of other problems.
- 31:03And so what he recommended, and I've been doing this for about two or three years it's a TNS procedure.
- 31:11I think that's what it's called.
- 31:12They put like a needle.
- 31:13It's kind of like acupuncture on my ankle.
- 31:16I sit there for 30 minutes.
- 31:17stimulates and he calls it voodoo because it works for some people and it doesn't work for some people.
- 31:25It depends on if your sacral arch is still intact or not And it is it's actually proven effective not just in actually very healthy women like you but in women who've had spinal cord injury women with multiple sclerosis women who are much older even than you are.
- 31:44So yes, that is absolutely, the other name for it is Transcutaneous Tibial Stimulation.
- 31:52Lovely, you have a very smart doctor.
- 31:55You are really lucky.
- 31:57I think it says on my chart because I always tell my doctors let's do a more natural approach.
- 32:03I do not want to take drugs.
- 32:05And so, he recommended this because I suffer chronic migraines as well.
- 32:11And so I do get Botox every 90 days for my migraines because I got tired of taking this list of drugs to try to prevent migraines.
- 32:23And what it was doing, it was causing all kinds of other problems.
- 32:27I was taking Neurontin, which I believe a lot of people take, and I call it the stupid pill because it made me feel dumb and I started repeating myself and I had this tick, you know, where my leg would jump.
- 32:42It was bad.
- 32:43And took six months to get off of it.
- 32:46Absolutely.
- 32:47You're right in your perception about Neurontin that a lot of people have that kind of reaction.
- 32:53There's a couple of other interesting things.
- 32:55You know, we always ask about headaches.
- 32:58We ask about whether you had premenstrual headaches, whether you get chronic headaches, migraine headaches, if you had headaches after you had a head injury, a traumatic brain injury.
- 33:08So we're always focusing also on headaches in patients who have a dementia risk.
- 33:14Because we really want to get at things that are fixable.
- 33:17So one of the interesting things that we found is that patients who have obstructive sleep apnea that is not treated, do have a higher tendency to have headaches, particularly in the morning, and that is directly correlated with the chronicity that you would characterize as a chronic migraine.
- 33:44So you will do yourself a favor if you have this taken a look at Yeah, I'm determined I'm going to contact my doctor and have him send me.
- 33:55And because I've also seen on TV that you don't have to wear a mask anymore.
- 34:00There's this, stop Oh, okay.
- 34:04They fooled you with that one they fooled you with that one.
- 34:07You're talk about the Inspire technique where it looks like oh, you're just holding up your remote control on your place it over here and you're good to go.
- 34:16Yeah okay.
- 34:17So here's the truth about inspire.
- 34:19This is why we don't recommend it for most people.
- 34:22You have to have moderate to severe sleep apnea to be a candidate.
- 34:26And tell her what that means.
- 34:27That means I was about to.
- 34:28Okay.
- 34:32That means that you have to stop breathing like 20 to 30 times or more per hour.
- 34:3630, 15 times an hour.
- 34:38Basically, where they decide.
- 34:41Thanks.
- 34:41So that's number one.
- 34:42Number two, it only works in about half the people.
- 34:46Number three, it's a surgical procedure.
- 34:48So they're actually implanting a stimulator there and it's only going to lower your rate by about 50%.
- 34:57So if you're one of the people who responds to it, you're not going to go from, let's say, 25 times per hour to only about 10 to 15 times per hour, where you're not breathing.
- 35:09Guess what?
- 35:10You've still got sleep apnea.
- 35:12So the issue with the CPAP is hugely overblown.
- 35:15They particularly set up those to play on people's sense of, I don't want that on my face; it's like having an octopus on my face.
- 35:26I don't want to look like that blah, blah, blah.
- 35:28I won't be sexy.
- 35:29It'll make me feel old.
- 35:32Which is what most people think.
- 35:35So we have to deal with that by helping them to reframe the treatment approach to this.
- 35:42One of the things that they need to understand is that they're putting it on after they've had sex.
- 35:48Yeah, you don't put it on before sex, it gets in the way.
- 35:53You have to put it on after.
- 35:55After.
- 35:55So afterwards, If you're a guy, you don't care.
- 36:01That's right.
- 36:02And if your wife is putting it on, go ahead.
- 36:04You're fine with that.
- 36:06I've never met a man who says, gee honey, I'm really upset about the fact since we've had sex that you're sleeping with something on your face.
- 36:14He doesn't care.
- 36:15And the lights are off.
- 36:17And so no one's going to see you wearing it.
- 36:19That's number one.
- 36:20Number two, most of the problems people have because they're active sleepers can be addressed by where they kind of mask they have.
- 36:28Some of them actually work with a little swivel on the top so it doesn't get in the way.
- 36:34And most of it can be worked out.
- 36:35It's one of those trumped up kind of problems to sell a very expensive surgical procedure.
- 36:43I recommend it for my patients who are moderate to severely demented and have sleep apnea because they're not going to figure out how to use a CPAP machine.
- 36:52And actually before that, I would have them wear a dental device.
- 36:56And the dental devices are a lot easier to use.
- 36:59They're only half as effective as the CPAP, but people tend to wear them more.
- 37:03So sometimes it sort of nets out at the same level of treatment.
- 37:08But ideally, if you can use a CPAP device, they are quiet, they are easy and Portable.
- 37:14Portable, yeap I was on the road four days out of seven, in 2014, 2015, and I had it in my suitcase every single trip.
- 37:25I wouldn't go anywhere without it.
- 37:27So talk about in your book, you had this patient who suffered of PTSD.
- 37:33He had depression.
- 37:34He did all this stuff and the solution was a CPAP.
- 37:39Talk about that because I think a lot of people might just say, oh, well, that's just not attractive.
- 37:43I'm not going to do it.
- 37:44Who cares if it's my brain cells?
- 37:49I'm not sure if they said the last part, but it's like, yeah, let me see the evidence.
- 37:53There's actually two slides that I would show for this.
- 37:57The first one is a combination of his PET scans, his positron emission tomography scan before and after he had been on CPAP for a period of about a year, I think it was at that point.
- 38:15And the before shows this downregulation of activation.
- 38:20Essentially, not much is going on in his brain.
- 38:24And we presented this at The Alzheimer's Association International Conference, I think in 2012.
- 38:31The second test was done, same guy, same machine, but after he'd been treated for a year and suddenly now, going along with the fact that his thinking was better, his test scores were better, his activity was better, his wife said he was better, his brain now is lighting up all over the place.
- 38:52And he went back to writing poetry and wrote his, and published his first book of poetry.
- 38:57What else happened the same year, 2012, that I just discovered this last year, is there was a very small paper that was presented in a journal on sleep, that showed the difference in beta amyloid levels in someone treated with CPAP.
- 39:18Where their beta amyloid levels, those glumpy kinds of proteins that we're trying to remove with expensive medications every two weeks with a diffusion these days.
- 39:28The new one, Donanemab, I can't remember, Xgeva or something is, is the brand name.
- 39:33Those actually, decreased substantially in somebody who was treating their sleep apnea.
- 39:42So it's another piece of this puzzle because we know that when people have losses of oxygen acutely, like in heart attacks, the level of the beta amyloid goes up in the hours after that.
- 39:54And so it all makes sense that this would fit together.
- 39:57And now we're actually, there's this case study showing how treating this, using that kind of imaging, shows a decline in their amyloid levels.
- 40:08Unfortunately, none of the pharmaceutical companies are paying attention to this.
- 40:12Which is a shame because it may be what's explaining some of the response to medication.
- 40:20Or the lack of response to medication.
- 40:24Well, you know, I've been taking, and this is not the exact one that I've been taking for over 20 years, but it's this, I don't know if you can see it.
- 40:33What Phosphatidylserine, Phosphatidylserine Phosphatidylserine I'm going to sabotage it, Phosphatidylserine.
- 40:42Well I used to get it from a vitamin store, it was called Neuro PS.
- 40:47I started taking it when I started going to law school.
- 40:50One of my friends recommended it.
- 40:52He said it helps you retain information.
- 40:55It's a brain vitamin.
- 40:56And I remember when I used to buy the other product that I can't no longer get.
- 41:01They used to say that studies were done with people that had Alzheimer's and it showed that it, slowed down the progression of Alzheimer's.
- 41:10Shame that no one published that.
- 41:14They had a book.
- 41:14I remember, that particular vitamin store had a book that they had, It was like, I don't know, like 14 page book about their studies of using this particular product on people with, cognitive issues.
- 41:29So, here's an important difference between, with all due respect to whoever that store was that published or sold or gave away that 14 page book with the information in those pages versus the information that's in our book.
- 41:44We did a lot of work with patients.
- 41:47We did a tremendous amount of research in all different specialty areas.
- 41:55That we could get our hands on across the world, available through the internet, plowed through that, and we only looked at the data that was statistically valid, that was well done science, that was reviewed by the world's experts in that area.
- 42:18We call that peer reviewed, and then was published in highly respected scientific and medical journals.
- 42:28So when we, and in fact our book itself, to get it published by Johns Hopkins University Press, we went through a series of peer review processes with J.
- 42:40H.
- 42:43In all likelihood, that 14 page handout that was in that store did not meet that same criteria.
- 42:55So we can, you as a lawyer, know that people will believe almost anything so long as they find it on black ink on white paper.
- 43:06Put something in black ink on white paper and give it to somebody to read and chances are you're going to find somebody to believe it.
- 43:13The reality of its reliability and accuracy and reproducibility is something completely different.
- 43:22So we went through the stringent criteria we went through for something to make it as a factor into our book was that it was really widely accepted in by major experts had bodies of research behind it that substantiated every single one of those factors that we targeted.
- 43:45And in fact, there are a lot of studies that come out on small sample sizes that never get replicated.
- 43:51Every day of the week.
- 43:53And they'll find that, you know, this supplement, this particular fruit, this food showed a benefit on one test out of perhaps 12 on this group of people.
- 44:06What they don't explain well enough in those, unfortunately, is that if you do 12 tests, the chances of one of them being positive just by chance is actually fairly high and that it needs to be replicated on another group and then expanded to larger samples for it to be something that you could bank on.
- 44:28But if you get that kind of positive thing, you can then say, cause this stuff isn't usually regulated by the FDA.
- 44:34You could say it supports brain health and you can sell it.
- 44:38There's a ton of money to be made in this area.
- 44:41And part of what we also know is that when people take something, then especially if they have to pay a lot of money for it, and it's a little hard to get, and they don't get any problems by taking any side effects that oftentimes they do feel better and they do focus better and they do have more energy.
- 44:59It's something that's called the placebo effect and it's very powerful.
- 45:02It's really something if you can harness placebo effect, I call it Dumbo's feather.
- 45:07I don't know if you remember the old Disney movie where Dumbo the flying elephant.
- 45:11He's flying around, he's got this feather in his trunk.
- 45:15Jiminy Cricket's up there in his hat.
- 45:17And at one point, he drops the feather.
- 45:20And he says, I can't fly I dropped my flying feather.
- 45:24And he goes crashing down to the floor of the circus.
- 45:28And Jiminy Cricket's telling him, flap your ears, flap your ears.
- 45:31It's not the feather.
- 45:34And sure enough, he does and everything's fine.
- 45:37But I feel the same way about a lot of things.
- 45:39And I like the fact that people feel better when they take something, because as long as it's not doing any harm, why not?
- 45:46It's good for them to feel better.
- 45:47And if it gives them that focus that they can go in and take their bar exam and do better than worrying about how they're going to do, I think it's great.
- 45:56But that may be the category that falls into.
- 45:58It's The placebo effect, for instance, is so strong that when the FDA has to approve a new antidepressant drug, they basically discount 25% of the improvement in the depression scores from the group that was actually given the drug versus the group that was given the control, the placebo.
- 46:24Because everyone rates themselves a little better six months later or three months later.
- 46:27Automatically.
- 46:28Yeah.
- 46:2825 percent of the effect that we get out any medication, it doesn't matter what it is, it's coming from placebo.
- 46:37And sometimes it's very legitimate our own body's endogenous release of chemicals.
- 46:42You take a couple Tylenol for a headache and within a matter of minutes, oftentimes you start feeling better.
- 46:49Well, that hasn't even had a chance to digest.
- 46:51What's happening?
- 46:52Well, we're starting to pre-release some of those endogenous endorphins.
- 46:57So it's good stuff.
- 46:58And that is true because sometimes I'll have a headache and I'll go downstairs I'll grab some Tylenol I put it here on my desk and I'll say I'll take it right now, but right now it doesn't happen.
- 47:07And then I'm like, my headache's gone and I looked down, I'm like, oh, there's my Tylenol.
- 47:12I'm like, oh, it's magic.
- 47:14It is magic.
- 47:17Good magic though.
- 47:20So in terms of all those supplements, forget the Prevagen.
- 47:24Forget all those kinds of things.
- 47:26Not worth spending your money on.
- 47:29Yeah.
- 47:30So tell me, as I mentioned before, brain fog, that's something that women go through.
- 47:35So would you say that perhaps some of that brain fog could be alleviated if women went out and got a sleep test.
- 47:44And maybe the brain fog wasn't, estrogen related or, you know, we're all getting old, but maybe it's not that it's just, we're not getting enough sleep or we're not getting the quality sleep that we need.
- 47:56Or it could be a combination of all those things.
- 47:59It can be all of those factors working together, which is what's more likely.
- 48:05It's not just one thing, it's the combination effect and it's produces a synergistic a problem.
- 48:12So yes.
- 48:13If you don't want to take estrogen, I get that completely.
- 48:17Get the obstructive sleep apnea diagnosed and fix that.
- 48:21If you've got problem with depression, and you may want to consider taking an antidepressant, have the obstructive sleep apnea looked at, but I'd also advise, somebody to start exercising on a daily basis because we know that exercise is going to affect depression.
- 48:43In fact, as much as an antidepressant will when we look at the relative benefits.
- 48:50So Mitch spends a lot of time getting his patients to change their behaviors.
- 48:57And there's a whole science behind that.
- 48:59But the one thing I would advocate for women who are potentially lazy as I am, I have been a slug my entire life.
- 49:07I hate to sweat.
- 49:09I don't like being hot.
- 49:11I hate exercise.
- 49:13But the one thing I've absolutely learned to adopt and my husband got me to do it, was I started with 10 minutes a day and I now build up to 90 minutes a day on a stationary bike.
- 49:25And it is absolutely critical.
- 49:28That's great.
- 49:30So when you're talking about how to get people to start doing, because a lot of us become very sedentary.
- 49:37Because we're busy, because we just don't have the time or the motivation.
- 49:44Of course, the less you do, the less you want to do, and the less you can do, because now it hurts, or you're unsteady, or you're afraid you're going to fall.
- 49:52So our formula for getting people to exercise is real simple, take a 10 minute walk.
- 49:58Do it three times a day.
- 50:00You'll see that in the book.
- 50:01And here's why this works; suppose I gave you an apple and said this is the best apple you ever wanted to eat.
- 50:07It's incredible, specially formulated apple, but you have to eat it in one bite.
- 50:16You'll look at me and say I don't know, I don't think today's the day for that, maybe tomorrow.
- 50:21Well, same thing with exercise.
- 50:23I don't care what kind of exercise program you devise for someone, what equipment you buy.
- 50:28Some people say, oh, I got the best bike.
- 50:30I got the best this.
- 50:31I got the best rowing machine.
- 50:32I belong to this place where I can get great classes.
- 50:35It's gorgeous.
- 50:36So yeah, but are you going?
- 50:37Well, not really.
- 50:39So you can't eat in one bite.
- 50:41You have to nibble.
- 50:43And that's why the 10 minute walk really works, because you don't need a lot of equipment, you need a pair of shoes.
- 50:51You can do it pretty much everywhere.
- 50:54There are some places where it may get too hot or too cold, but still 10 minutes oftentimes is enough that you can tolerate it.
- 51:02If it's raining, you're not going to melt.
- 51:05You're not going to hurt yourself.
- 51:07You're going to find your way back home again, in most cases.
- 51:10And it builds up, it's cumulative.
- 51:12So those 10 minutes, three times a day are 30 minutes, 210 minutes a week.
- 51:19If you walk in fast enough, if you're walking briskly, which is defined as walking quickly enough that your heart rate goes up, but you can still talk.
- 51:30You're not going to walk about nine or ten miles a week, which ain't shabby.
- 51:35And you can then double dip.
- 51:37You can use that to catch up on your messages that you're listening to.
- 51:40You can make a phone call.
- 51:42You can listen to a podcast.
- 51:45You can listen to music.
- 51:48Call someone that you haven't spoken to just to say hi, make a social connection.
- 51:52What you're doing there is you're sort of double dipping with your exercise by combining it with social connectivity, both of which are really critical to beating dementia.
- 52:02So what's stopping you becomes the question.
- 52:06Yeah.
- 52:07And I know another thing that you, in your book, you talked about the social connection, but you also just talked about breathing clean air.
- 52:16You know, it's important.
- 52:17Go out, breathe clean air, get out in nature.
- 52:21Very important.
- 52:22Yep.
- 52:23Of course, for some people that's harder than to do than in other places.
- 52:27Especially if they live in LA.
- 52:28Especially if there's a forest fire going on.
- 52:31There actually is a risk that's recently been published by inhaling secondary smoke from forest fires.
- 52:38I feel badly for you guys in California because Increases the risk of dementia, which is not surprising.
- 52:44We know there's a direct connection between our lungs, our heart, and our brain.
- 52:48So maybe wearing those COVID masks when you're just walking outside and there's a forest fire in the area makes some sense.
- 52:56Yeah.
- 52:57Oh, that's what I was going to ask you.
- 52:58Have you noticed, because I got COVID last year when I came back from Hawaii.
- 53:03And I noticed that after I got COVID, you know, after all the horrible symptoms went away, I have like this brain fog.
- 53:12And I'll be honest with you, that brain fog took me several months.
- 53:16I mean, like four or five, maybe six months shake off.
- 53:21Have you guys noticed any correlation in people's cognitive issues after getting COVID?
- 53:27It's well documented that depending on how fragile the person is to begin with and how severe, a case they developed, that COVID can have long term effects on somebody's cognition.
- 53:41It's been demonstrated in good research that's been done.
- 53:45The more common effect that we tend to see and what people don't appreciate, is that when you do have a virus, that virus is making changes to your genetics, and the effect of that is releasing all kinds of chemical transmitters in your body.
- 54:07Cytokines, Chemokines, and they can actually affect the way your brain works and the way your muscles work.
- 54:16So that fatigue and that heaviness and that feeling like you're thinking through mud sensation, is very much a side effect of the effects of the illness and the virus with which you were dealing.
- 54:30It's a real thing.
- 54:32Fortunately for most people, it's sort of like concussions the acute symptoms go away.
- 54:37There is that miserable minority of people, however, who can end up having these problems for all we know into the future indefinitely.
- 54:46But for most people, it's a transient kind of thing.
- 54:50And, we also want to guard against their becoming secondarily depressed, where they lose hope.
- 54:56They stop doing, they don't exercise anymore because it's too fatiguing and they pull back from a lot of things.
- 55:03So sometimes the secondary effects can be almost as disabling as the primary effects.
- 55:08A lot of people weren't aware of this kind of effect until so many people in our population had COVID.
- 55:15So it was really stuck underneath our noses.
- 55:18But well, before COVID hit, we knew that about 30 percent of people ages 30 to 50 years old who were hospitalized, in other words, they were seriously sick enough, with a pneumonia, a community acquired pneumonia.
- 55:37Your average garden variety pneumonia, if they had to go to the hospital, one year after that hospitalization, these people had quantitatively objective measurable decreases in their cognitive ability.
- 55:52So that's an average pneumonia, not even COVID.
- 55:56So this kind of effect is true of a lot of diseases.
- 56:02It's funny that you called this when they first started with the COVID pandemic.
- 56:05Emily says yep, we're going to be seeing a lot of people with subsequent cognitive changes because of this virus and the way it's transmitted.
- 56:13And the fact that so much of it goes up through your nose, as well as affecting your lungs.
- 56:18And because of the, increases in your body temperature, it's just, we're going to be seeing this cognitively and you were correct.
- 56:25Thanks, honey.
- 56:26As usual.
- 56:28I always say that.
- 56:30Yeah, so where can people learn more about the work you do?
- 56:37So, the most immediate place to learn is by going to our website, which is called Braindoc, B R A I N D O C, just like it sounds, Braindoc.com.
- 56:49You'll see some information about each of us.
- 56:52they will see some information about various things that we've published.
- 56:58They will see links to about 40 plus podcasts, none as good as these, this one, but okay, they're good enough.
- 57:09And a link to purchase our book if they want to.
- 57:12Our book's available in a lot of bookstores, but also directly on Amazon, so you can get it in a day or two.
- 57:18You can download it onto Kindle today.
- 57:21You can get it also on audiobook.
- 57:24Because it's very nicely narrated, and we didn't do the narration.
- 57:28An actress did that and she's incredible.
- 57:31You can also get in the library.
- 57:32I have no problem with staring people because we're really excited when we find out the Vancouver Public Library has like 12 copies of our book.
- 57:40That's really cool.
- 57:41So, I know there's a couple places you wouldn't think and it's like, wow, they've got that many copies.
- 57:47Other places it's on interlibrary loan.
- 57:50The other thing that's going to be very interesting, I think, is that we have on our website a dementia prevention checklist.
- 57:57Now you see it in the book that explains it, but you can also use the QR code in the book to get to our website, or you can go directly to the website and go to the checklist.
- 58:09And it's 25 questions that will give you basically a whole profile of your individualized dementia risk.
- 58:21And then steps to take to mitigate the risk.
- 58:25And we're coming out by the time this podcast airs, we will be able to have this available in a format that people can see a whole picture of where they're on target.
- 58:39Where they're near target and where they're off target as well as a table for each of these an Individualized kind of plan that they can use to really actively reduce their risk.
- 58:52Which is for us really exciting because we want this to be something that people use not just read and say well That's interesting.
- 59:01We want them to say I'm going to do something now I want to reduce my risk.
- 59:07So hopefully this will get the word out and people will go there BrainDoc.
- 59:13And I always ask my guests this, what future projects are you currently working on and when will we expect to see those amazing new projects?
- 59:23That is a multi-million dollar question for us.
- 59:26Because we got four irons in the fire.
- 59:29Emily wants to do another book.
- 59:30I want to do another book.
- 59:31Starting with prenatal protection against dementia in our children.
- 59:37Dementia proof your baby, your child.
- 59:39Because it can start that young.
- 59:42I want to do workshops and talks that are going to take this to people who can use it today, rather than waiting for that child to grow older.
- 59:53So, uh, hopefully we're going to, continue.
- 59:56We're doing a variety of talks in various, venues.
- 1:00:00By the time this comes out, we'll have done a talk in Philadelphia and a couple in Virginia on a tour that we're doing in September.
- 1:00:08I don't know.
- 1:00:09It's, uh, it's, it's exciting.
- 1:00:12I will say again, I said this off air, I loved your book.
- 1:00:15I mean, I could not put it down.
- 1:00:17I sat there and I read and I read and I read and my daughter's like, what are you doing, mom?
- 1:00:21Because I have the digital copy and so I've been reading it on my screen.
- 1:00:25At first I thought it was going to have a lot of medical terms and it was going to be dry.
- 1:00:30But it wasn't it was so interesting.
- 1:00:33And of you guys explained it in a way that's easy for non-medical people to understand it.
- 1:00:41And I love that.
- 1:00:42Great Thank you.
- 1:00:44That was our goal.
- 1:00:46Thank you very much.
- 1:00:48So thank you very much for coming on.
- 1:00:50I will post all of your information in the show notes so the people can know how to get ahold of you, know how to download this checklist, and also purchase your book.
- 1:01:00I think it's a book everyone needs to read.
- 1:01:03Don't think that this is a book that needs to be read if you're in your 60s or 70s, I think this is a book that needs to be read if you're thinking about having children, Mm hmm Because, there's a lot of information there that I didn't even think of.
- 1:01:20We'd actually like to see it in book clubs where people could read it and discuss what they're doing because we know that if you're telling someone else what you're doing to improve yourself, you're more likely to do it.
- 1:01:36And they'll give you feedback on it.
- 1:01:38I agree.
- 1:01:38All right.
- 1:01:39Thank you Carmen for very much Wow, what an enlightening conversation with Drs.
- 1:01:43Emily and Mitchell Clionsky.
- 1:01:46It's episodes like these that remind us of the power we hold in our hands, or rather in our heads to shape our health and future.
- 1:01:58Thank you again to Emily and Mitchell for taking the time to share their combined 70 years of professional and clinical experience in medical and neuropsychology.
- 1:02:10Remember, every step you take toward understanding and protecting your brain is a step toward a vibrant, fulfilling life.
- 1:02:20So why not start making those changes today?
- 1:02:24And don't forget to pick up a copy of Drs.
- 1:02:27Emily and Mitchell Clionsky book, Dementia Prevention: Using Your Head to Save Your Brain, and additional resources.
- 1:02:37I've added their links and more at createthebestme.com/ep086.
- 1:02:46Thank you for tuning in to create the best me.
- 1:02:48Join us next week for another inspiring episode, crafted just for you.
- 1:02:54Until then, keep dreaming big.
- 1:02:57Take care of yourself and remember you are beautiful, strong, and capable of creating the best version of yourself.
- 1:03:06Thank you for watching.
- 1:03:08Catch you next week.
- 1:03:09Bye for now.