HAVE YOU EVER HAD SOMEONE YOU LOVE STRUGGLE WITH ALZHEIMER’S? EVER WORRIED THAT IT COULD AFFECT YOU AS WELL? If so, you’re not alone. I’m going to say that we are on the verge of some major breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s research, and today I’m going to share some of them with you.
SHOW NOTES
2:33 Psilocybin effective as an adjunct with SSRIs
5:41 Is there a cure for genetic deafness?
7:32 What treatment could restore up to total hearing?
14:38 Research shows you CAN reverse cognitive decline
Looking to optimize your health or performance? Join my Gene Hack Boot Camp and catch it at the root cause...https://drbriangbrown.com/genehack/bootcamp
Have a question for Dr. Brian?
https://drbriangbrown.com/question
HAVE YOU EVER HAD SOMEONE YOU LOVE STRUGGLE WITH ALZHEIMER’S? EVER WORRIED THAT IT COULD AFFECT YOU AS WELL? If so, you’re not alone. I’m going to say that we are on the verge of some major breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s research, and today I’m going to share some of them with you.
SHOW NOTES
2:33 Psilocybin effective as an adjunct with SSRIs
5:41 Is there a cure for genetic deafness?
7:32 What treatment could restore up to total hearing?
14:38 Research shows you CAN reverse cognitive decline
Looking to optimize your health or performance? Join my Gene Hack Boot Camp and catch it at the root cause...https://drbriangbrown.com/genehack/bootcamp
Have a question for Dr. Brian?
https://drbriangbrown.com/question
EP59_BoostingMemoryDecreasingAlzheimersRisk
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
psilocybin, Alzheimer, mice, apoptosis, plasma, exercise, study, CLU, ciliary, called, sedentary, hearing loss, sweet spot, gene, brain, cellular debris, research, fibers, scientists, hear
Dr Brian G Brown 00:00
The mission is simple: to help high achievers naturally eliminate emotional and physical obstacles, so they can optimize their life for higher achievement. Welcome, you just entered the Genesis Zone.
Have you ever had someone you love, struggle with or even die from Alzheimer's? I know I have lost four people in my life to Alzheimer's. It's horrible disease. In fact, I've often said that you lose that person long before the body physically dies. Well, have you ever worried that Alzheimer's could affect you as well? If so, you're not alone. I'm going to say that hands down it’s probably one of the most common worries that I see in the clinic on a functional medicine side where people come in and say, Listen, my mother, my grandmother had Alzheimer's, I don't want to go through that. I want to do everything I can to avoid that.
I'm going to say that we are on the verge of some of the best breakthroughs in Alzheimer's research that we've seen in decades that we've been doing this research. And today I'm going to be sharing some of those breakthroughs with you. There are things that we can take advantage of now. There are a couple of caveats there and I'll talk about those as we go through the show. But we can take advantage of these right now.
But first, I want to give a brief update on the psilocybin series that I did last month. I promised that I would keep you up to date on any new developments or breakthroughs that were coming out. And that's exactly what I'm going to do. So, several weeks ago, I shared in my series on psilocybin that researchers discovered in a head-to-head study with a very popular SSRI antidepressant that two doses of psilocybin 25 milligrams, outperformed over a month's worth of daily dosing of that antidepressant.
Now, researchers from the same group have released data from the second arm of that clinical trial. They discovered that psilocybin 25 milligrams is highly effective as an adjunct therapy adjunct, just a clinical term for add on therapy.
Psilocybin, 25 milligrams is highly effective as an add on therapy to existing SSRI treatment regimens.
Now, this doesn't surprise me in the least, clinically, having 24 years of psychiatric background, it just doesn't surprise me. After all, alone, by itself, psilocybin, 25 milligrams in the previous arm of the study outperformed the SSRI. So why wouldn't it enhance its outcome? That's not surprising. What is surprising is what we didn't have - the safety data, we got the efficacy data, we know that it's very effective in treating depression. But we didn't have the safety data on whether or not we could combine psilocybin with SSRIs. Now we have that safety data.
What this arm of the study actually showed, it was not only effective, but very safe. So, I just wanted to bring that as an update so that you could be aware that psilocybin in extremely low doses, for some people will be a standalone therapy. For other people, it will be an add on therapy, an adjunct therapy. Why is that? What makes the difference between the two? Well, a treatment naive person or a person who's never been on an antidepressant may find themselves on an occasional dose every week, every two weeks dose of psilocybin versus a daily dose of an SSRI. Their clinician may choose to start with psilocybin first, which will be a great choice.
Dr Brian G Brown 04:31
And then there may be those who are already on SSRIs. And I can tell you from clinical experience, if I've got a person that has had a 60% improvement with an existing therapy, and I know I can combine another therapy with that, to get them 100% improvement. I'm probably going to leave the existing therapy alone. So having this information is actually a major coup for psychiatric professionals, mental health professionals.
As we learn to navigate the waters of what it's like to prescribe psilocybin now, in the state that I live in, and actually 47 states right now, you can't prescribe psilocybin, you just can't do it, it's coming. There are policies being put in place now on a professional level, which are opening up doors for when this happens, we will be able to do it. But right now, we can't do it. But we're getting prepared, and we're getting educated. And I want the public to be educated as well, because I think this is life changing.
Now, I want to switch gears a little bit. And I want to move into the world of gene research, this one really, really, really excites me.
Scientists working with mice have found a way to reverse genetic hearing loss.
That's that that hearing loss that kind of tends to run in families. You'll see it start in early childhood in humans. It starts in early childhood and progresses until there's total hearing loss. Every now and then you'll see it see it start a little bit later, like in teens, or 20s. And it will also progress until a person loses their hearing.
I've got a friend that did that started developing that problem in his 20s. And it's progressed until he's dependent on hearing aids because he's legally deaf without them. Now genetically, mice and humans share very similar ear anatomy, the anatomy is very similar. And the anatomy that I'm gonna be talking about here related to this specific gene. And this genetic disorder affects the hair like fibers, we call them ciliary fibers in the inner ear, behind the eardrum, and the ciliary fibers stimulate the nerves that transmit the signal to the brain, and they're interpreted as sound.
Now, what they found is in this genetic disorder is that the ciliary fibers are tangled up like a bowl of spaghetti. Therefore, they're not easily stimulated, they're not easily moved. Because they're all tangled. What they should look like, is a row of very neat pencils that have been sharpened and stacked in a row. And they can just kind of flow with the wind and move with the wind, they move very, very easily.
But in the in this genetic deficiency, we've got the tangled ciliary hair fibers. Now, through an amazing breakthrough scientist at Boston Children's Hospital was able to modify this aberrant gene, this bad gene and modify the genetic pathway that causes this genetic deafness. By doing so they were able to restore normal ciliary function to this inner ear component, the small hair like fiber structures. Now, what's amazing about that, that I mean, just by itself, that alone is absolutely amazing. But what's even more amazing is that they expected to have some hearing improvement.
What they found was that they had total hearing restoration.
Now, I don't know about you, but I know kids that have had to have brain surgery to have cochlear implants put in, so they can hear. And this could potentially eliminate probably, I don't know the exact numbers, but around 60% of those cases. That's astronomical numbers, guys.
And the only thing we have to do at this point is see whether or not this gene therapy can actually be translated into human use. We have a lot of similarities in the anatomy and the genetic structures, so I am pretty sure that we're on the cusp of something really, really big when it comes to restoring this genetic hearing loss.
Dr Brian G Brown 09:12
Now, let's go on to today's topic. It goes without saying that exercise in the right amounts at the right frequency, and the right intensity are good for you. It's good for your heart. It's good for your blood vessels. It's good for your metabolism. It's good for your blood flow and the heart and in the brain. And it's good for controlling inflammation and improving brain function.
For years scientists have desperately wanted to isolate the chemical constituents that caused these positive changes. They hypothesized but they couldn't quite identify them that that is until now. A study published in Nature Journal about seven days ago revealed that the plasma, which is the protein component of your blood, the plasma of mice who run and exercise and are more active than the other mice in the community ~ Their plasma contains high levels of a protein structure called Clusterin, or we'll call it CLU for short. And this CLU protein has significant health promoting properties, such as clearing out dead cellular debris and causing a process called apoptosis.
When you hear apoptosis, the central word there is pop, I want you to think of bursting, popping, okay? That's what apoptosis is. So, when your body identifies a mutated cell, it should in a healthy body, it should identify that mutated cell as it doesn't need to be here. And it calls in the troops to cause apoptosis or bursting or killing, programmed death of that cell. It's a necessary process. Without it, we would be eaten up with cancer.
Every single person walking on the planet has cancer cells in their body. And you may not know that. That may be the first time you've heard it. But through this process called apoptosis, our immune system, our body takes care of it. We've known for a while that CLU, this protein is involved in this apoptosis process. And it's also involved in the autophagy process of clearing out the dead cellular debris. Okay.
And you may have heard about autophagy, in reference to intermittent fasting, that's one way to increase your autophagy is to intermittent fast. But that's totally separate conversation. So, understand that these mice that are healthier, they exercise more, they're more active, they have these high levels of this protein called CLU, therefore, they're able to clear out cellular debris at a very rapid rate. And they're able to take care of these mutated cells that need to be killed and cleared out of the body.
So, what's so amazing about this? Well, the astonishing thing that happened was the scientists pondered the question, or query, what if we transfused the plasma from these healthy active mice with these high CLU levels? What if we transfuse that plasma into a sedentary mouse with low CLU levels?
And an amazing thing occurred! The inflammatory genes in the brains of the sedentary mice were downregulated. In other words, the bad genes were cut off and the good genes were turned on. In other words, that translates into neurological inflammation or brain and from inflammation simply just disappeared. So much so that when they saw this phenomenon, they said, why don't we do some memory tests with these sedentary mice who have received this transfusion of this healthy plasma?
What they found is that the memory function of the sedentary mice improved, not only did their brain inflammation decrease, but their memory improved.
That's huge guys. The fact that plasma CLU can be transferred from one mouse to another, it only opens up the door for human studies of the same design, which could very well revolutionize Alzheimer's treatment, Alzheimer's research, as we know it.
Dr Brian G Brown 14:08
And I really do think that this is the future epigenome This is epigenetic modification at its best. We know that exercise is healthy, we know it has an epigenetic impact on the body. Now we're starting to see that maybe we can transfer that epigenetic positive impact from one being to another, just with a plasma transfer. I don't know. We'll see. I'll keep you posted on this.
Similarly, just two days ago, there was research published by the University of Queensland, and they found a “sweet spot” of exercise that actually reverses cognitive decline.
Now that's a bold statement that is actually from the title of the study. They said it really versus cognitive decline. Now, in order to make a bold statement like that and get away with it, you got to have some really good data, they just happen to have 10 years’ worth of data. That's how long it took them to conduct this study and run all their trials and find this “sweet spot”.
Now, how did they define this sweet spot that actually reversed cognitive decline? Well, they define this sweet spot as, as this zone, whereby the body through exercise releases growth hormone, to the point that the growth hormone promotes neurogenesis or the production and growth of new neurons in the brain.
Now, again, the studies both of these studies were conducted in mice. So, with this particular study, they actually talked about the timing, the duration and the type of exercise that these mice underwent in order to achieve that sweet spot, but I chose not to talk to you about the timing, duration or type of exercise, because it was done with mice. And I don't want somebody to extrapolate that Dr. Brian said, if we exercise for this length of time, this many days per week, and this type of exercise, that we would be able to reverse cognitive decline. We can't make that that determination right now, because this study was done with mice.
But what it does is it opens the door for further research in humans. And that will be the next step that the University of Queensland and others around the world who pick up on this research, study, take and run with and it will happen.
I'll keep you posted on what is happening in the world of Alzheimer's research, brain research and things like that. I think it's the penultimate of biohacking, if you will, when we can start to biohack the brain to the point where we don't have to worry about dementia or Alzheimer's or anything like that.
Last week we talked about Alzheimer's and its relationship to the Viagra. Viagra actually decreasing the risk for Alzheimer's. I mean, come on, who would ever think? This week we talked more about mouse studies that are going to lead into some human studies related to exercise and the benefits of exercise.
Even if you're not exercising and it gets transfused into you through healthy plasma. I don't know who knows, we'll find out. But that's all I got for this week. Tune in next Thursday at noon eastern standard time for our next in the zone segment where I'll be sharing the latest research and my insights about that research as it relates to optimizing your physical, emotional, and biohacking epigenetic wellness journey, most informed, most trusted and most grateful you spent this time with you with us today. Until next time, stay in the zone. I'm Dr. Brian Brown.