Dr. Kat Toups speaks about the Details of How to Reverse Alzheimer’s Disease with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

7:42  Metabolic factors, including fasting glucose, insulin, and Hemoglobin A1C are all important factors in preventing and reversing Alzheimer’s Disease.  Rather than having specific targets for these lab values, Dr. Toups’ goal with her patients is to see how much she can optimize these factors.  Ideally for nutrient levels, we want them in the middle range, but for metabolic factors, we generally want them lower. We know that high blood sugar is destructive to the blood vessels, to the end organs and that has sort of long been known as a factor for dementia and for Alzheimer’s.  They had all the patients follow a ketogenic diet for the benefits of ketones for the brain and the patients were in ketosis for the majority of the time.  This definitely helped to manage the blood sugar and insulin levels.  It is also important to measure insulin to see how hard the patients are working to get their blood sugar to where it’s at. If they are eating too many carbs, their insulin level may end up too high. There are also patient who have had high blood sugar so long that their pancreatic beta cells are not making enough insulin.

16:11  Lipids. It is important to have good blood flow to the brain, so monitoring advanced lipids is important for Alzheimer’s patients.  Most of the patients in the trial saw improvements in their lipids related to the types of carbs and fats that they were eating, as well as due to the exercise, their improved sleep, and the focus on getting them into a parasympathetic or meditative state. Taking statin medications can be a problem for these patients because they can lower cholesterol too much and this can be bad for the brain and it can even cause dementia.  Cholesterol is need for the brain, for the myelin sheath that surrounds nerves, for the phospholipid layers around the cells, and for neuron formation.  Cholesterol is also a precursor for your hormones like testosterone, estrogen, DHEA, and pregnenolone.  Statins can drive the cholesterol level too low, such as down to the 130s.  That is too low to support brain and hormonal health.  Dr. Toups discussed a patient that she had who came to her in his early 90s and his main risk factors for Alzheimer’s were that he had been taking statins for a long time and had cholesterol in the 130s for all that time. He also was taking Finasteride for an enlarged prostate, which can reduce testosterone levels, which can also impact brain health.

22:54  There are a number of medications that can negatively affect brain health, including Anti-cholinergic medicines (which are drugs that block the action of acetylcholine) like some of the older antihistamines like Benadryl and some of the OTC sleep medications and drugs that treat urinary incontinence, antidepressants, antihistamines, some of the nausea drugs, and psych drugs in general. 

25:18  Nutrient status is important for brain health, so Dr. Toups and her colleagues used the NutraEval from Genova, which measures all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, fatty acids, amino acids, and even looks at some heavy metals.  She finds that many dementia patients are low in vitamin D and B12.  For vitamin D, Dr. Toups likes to see a level of 50-80 ng/mL.  If your vitamin D level is less than 30, your risk for dementia is increased by 75%.  For most of us, just getting out in the sun a bit is not enough. You still need vitamin D supplementation.  We really should be measuring nutrients levels, including in children because many children are deficient and we need...