Catherine Crofts is a New Zealand community-based clinical pharmacist who firmly believes in using the lowest dose of the least number of medications to treat disease. After 17 years of practice, she feels more like a “disease management specialist” than a health professional.

Together with Caryn Zinn, Mark Wheldon, and Grant Schofield, Catherine is the author of Hyperinsulinemia: A unifying theory of chronic disease?

Catherine blogs at Lifestyle Before Medication.

Catherine will soon be known as Dr. Crofts after successfully defending her Ph.D. thesis where she analysed the oral glucose and insulin tolerance data of Dr. Joseph Kraft. Catherine will talk more about that work and why fasting insulin is a useless biomarker in the upcoming Keto Summit, in this interview we focus on the role of insulin resistance in dementia.

Here’s the outline of this interview with Catherine Crofts:

0:00:42    Professor Grant Schofield and Dr. Caryn Zinn.

0:00:47    Dr. Joseph Kraft from Chicago. Book: Diabetes Epidemic & You.

0:02:37    Schizophrenia and bipolar disease.

0:03:41    Type 3 diabetes.

0:03:45    Alzheimer's dementia is very, very much a disease of diabetes and insulin and glucose.

0:04:00    Protein tangles within the brain.

0:04:03    Vascular dementia which is associated with the blood vessels.

0:04:25    Lewy body dementia which is another type of protein deposit.

0:04:32    Amyloid plaques.

0:04:42    Most people with dementia will have a mixed dementia.

0:04:53    CT scan of the brain.

0:06:04    Substantia nigra and movement problems.

0:06:13    Frontotemporal system system

0:07:11    Dr. Kirk Parsley talked about Professor Robert Sapolsky.

0:10:44    The Whitehall Study showed some people noticing cognitive changes starting at age 48.

0:12:15    Apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene.

0:12:21    Neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

0:12:28    Tau protein.

0:13:22    Large and small clumps of beta-amyloid might be protective.

0:13:51    Synaptic plasticity and PSA-NCAM

0:14:46    Type 2 diabetes is one of the biggest risk factors for Alzheimer's.

0:16:05    Insulin prevents a process called fibrinolysis.

0:17:30    GLUT1.

0:24:13    Glutamate can be a little bit toxic to the brain.

0:24:46    GABA is a calming neurotransmitter.

0:27:22    A ketogenic diet for dementia.

0:41:50    Keto Summit.