Lecture: 11th Annual CHNC, Mild Cognitive Impairment

Since 2000, deaths from heart disease have decreased by 14%, while deaths from Alzheimer’s disease have increased by 89%. Alzheimer’s disease is the third-leading cause of death in the USA. There is a major distinction between just memory loss and a wider range of cognitive abilities and decline.

In this lecture, Dr. Hoffman discusses how to differentiate between mild symptoms of cognitive decline versus those of advancing Alzheimer’s dementia. Only 5% of all incidents of Alzheimer’s disease are considered genetic in origin; the rest are caused by lifestyle factors over which we can exert significant control.

Dr. Hoffman also talks about the different subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease, many of the 150 potential risk factors for their development and the lifestyle, nutritional, hormonal and medication interventions that can make a marked difference in patient outcomes.

Mild Cognitive Impairment 11th Annual CHNC Part 1

Dr Bruce Hoffman

Mild Cognitive Impairment 11th Annual CHNC Part 2

Dr Bruce Hoffman

Transcript

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

And so, I look at the broader model, the seven levels of healing, I look upstream, I look at the family system. Epigenetically, you don’t escape the fate of your forefathers. Whatever fate your forefathers went through, you don’t escape it, you epigenetically manifest their experiences and if they have unresolved experiences, traumas, murders, deaths, you do not escape the effects. It has been studied extensively, many studies now, mainstream research, this is not esoteric research, with children that have been born since the world trade centres went down- higher incidence of PTSD even though they weren’t there. These events were just epigenetically transmitted.  

We know through cognitive behavior therapy that if you don’t change the way you interpret reality, you can release a whole storm of inflammatory and toxic neurochemistry which then influences your cellular expression of micro RNA, which then influences metabolic cellular outcomes; so your very thoughts, every single thought you think, 60,000 thoughts a day depending on how you bias those thoughts, determines physiological outcomes. That’s what CBT is all about. Those of you know about CBT- (cognitive behavioral therapy) – is all about changing the way you interpret reality, based on a new world view or interpretation. We have a saying in this work that we don’t heal until we actually have a new image, a new way of interpretation, a new way of looking at the world, a new story. Also, we don’t heal until we align ourselves in an accepting if not loving way with our mothers and fathers, and our ancestors. Those of you who hate your mothers and fathers. Those of you who cut off from your mothers and fathers. Those of you who judge your mothers and fathers for not having given you enough. You need to maybe open that up and look a bit closer because you are half your mother and you are half your father. How are you going to heal and cut off half your lifeforce? You can’t do it.  I tell my kids, when they need new partners, I say to them, here’s your screening tool, the one question to ask the person in front of you to whom you are potentially attracted to, “how are you with your mother and father”? Just ask the question. If they tell you that they hate their mother and father, and that they never want to see them again, run like hell. It’s not going to go well. And I tell you that’s a very reliable indicator for how people are in the world. So we use a much larger, larger model to view and interpret people’s health.

Just by way of some definitions. Dementia is when cognition fails, but Alzheimer’s is characterized by particular findings that you find in the brain. The tangles, and the amyloid plaque that defines Alzheimer’s and although it starts with memory loss, it very soon ends up in the inability to formulate language, and then socialize, and then eventually end up in the with the reptilian brain expression where you barely function. You can eat, you can sleep, but your whole orientation to the world outside of you is shut down. 

There are different types of dementia. Alzheimer’s is the most common, but there are other types. Neurologists are extraordinarily good diagnosticians. So, if anybody has a dementing process, or cognitive decline, you really do want to see your neurologist because they have the ability to really discern the subtleties of different types of dementia, and what differentiates Alzheimer’s disease from other forms of dementia. As I said there is the APOE4 gene- if you have the APOE  3/3 gene, you have a 9% risk of Alzheimer’s. If you have the 3/4 gene you have a 30% three times increased risk, and if you have the 4/4 gene you have a 50-90% risk potential for developing Alzheimer’s disease as you age if you don’t do something to change the inputs. There is a website https://www.apoe4.info/wp/ for carriers of these genes because the people who run this website are aware now of how profound this gene is. This website is dedicated to informing individuals with the gene and what can be done to down-regulate the potentially negative outcomes of disease expression. 

I’m going to skip some of the basics because I know I’m going to run out of time but here’s the hallmark of Alzheimer’s, these tau tangles which are in the neurofibrillary and the amyloid plaque. This creates an inflammatory response which shuts down neuronal synaptic communication, which kills neurons so as your synapses die from these tangles, neurons die. Your brain atrophies and dementia can ensue, and if you had to look at what in at the most minute level- what’s really going on in Alzheimer’s disease. It has everything to do with the interplay between trophic factors and blastic factors, growth factors and destructive factors that influence one particular protein called the amyloid precursor protein. This is where amyloid plaque comes from, it comes from this protein. It’s a subset of it and you have what are called molecular scissors, or proteases that come along and they snip through this amyloid precursor protein. If it makes one snip, you get the anti-Alzheimer’s outcome. If it makes four snips, you get the pro Alzheimer’s outcome, so the entire Bredesen protocol is everything to do with how you influence these molecular scissors to favorably produce the two pieces of amyloid precursor protein, as opposed to the four. That’s what it is, what you can do to drive support for neurons, as opposed to destruction of neurons by influencing these molecular switches. That’s it at the molecular level anyway. 

So, we don’t go progress straight to Alzheimer’s disease. Before Alzheimer’s occurs, there’s a subjective cognitive decline that can occur, for people 10-15 years before where people may say “I’m just off my game, I’m not as smart as I used to be now.” Normal aging produces this, our brains slow down but if you are going down the dementing routes- if you’re going down the Alzheimer’s route, you may start in a preclinical way. Some of your tests may be already positive before you actually pick it up. It’s subjective decline. Then you actually start to get mild cognitive decline where you actually objectively starting to register negatively with specific testing. I can’t tell you how many people come to my office who are running corporations, CEOs, with mild cognitive decline. Their biochemistry, their markers of cognition, they fail, but they’re still operational but they’ve got objective signs of decline. After that is when you lose tasks of daily living and you start to go down the dementing path. There is a difference between dementia and normal aging with statements like “I forgot my keys.” People with just normal aging usually remember where they parked. They can retrace their movements and realize, “Ah that’s where I left them.” So, these are some differences, but it’s a bit of a fuzzy line in the beginning. As I said those of you on the right side of your biological drives when your brains speed is still travelling at 300 milliseconds. You still got a good brain speed, so you’re not so concerned about this but I’m personally on the other side of that curve and I’m very concerned about things like this. That’s why I started the brain treatment centre, not only to help patients. I had a selfish interest; I want to keep my brain moving at 300 milliseconds for as long as I can. Okay so this is the difference. Everything has to do with brain speed. Our brains move at 300 milliseconds per second. After age 20, and every decade thereafter, 10 milliseconds are lost just through normal aging. That’s profound, you know when your brain speed slows down you literally slow down. When your brain slows down, neurons and synapses die and there may be a bad outcome if you don’t do something about it. There’s a separation, a gap, between thinking a thought and executing the thought, by doing. 

There’s many reasons why people’s brains slow down or are exacerbated by lifestyle issues that don’t lead to necessarily dementing Alzheimer’s illness. The aging is the number one cause of brain slowing down but then you may have strokes and stress. People also drink far too much, it’s a neurotoxin they get addicted to. Certain things, prescription medications, can have profound effects. I mean you have no idea how many statins are given out like candy. Some of them cross the blood-brain barrier and shut down cholesterol metabolism. Cholesterol is a building block of brain neurons and myelin. You have got to think before people start taking these drugs. Some people come into the office and we suggest they go through something called the Cognoscopy. Everybody at age 50 gets a free colonoscopy, free under health care. Now, in terms of the future, start spreading the word, ask you friends, ask your parents, mom have you undergone a cognoscopy? A cognoscopy is a brain evaluation. Now your mother will say no because it doesn’t exist in the healthcare system. We can plant the seed; we can start thinking about it. It will happen because as I said in the beginning, try living one day without a functional brain. You know, it’s awful.

At the clinic we do questionnaires. Any of you recognize this MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment)? You recognize it? Do you remember Donald Trump 2 months ago flashed this test and said “I’m brilliant, I’m a genius.” No, I’m serious he did pass the most elementary of cognition testing called the MoCA- and this is a five-minute test. He got 30 out of 30 apparently, but people with dementia they fail it. If you know anybody with a score less than 19, you’re on the wrong side of your MoCA. Your MoCA score for the average Alzheimer’s patient is around 16, 16.2. If the score is 19 to 22 those people with dementia will, if they can’t you now- they can’t take care of the daily tasks of living.  That’s a serious pattern. People with a mild cognitive impairment they have a MoCA score between 22 to 25. People who passed had a score of 26 or up. If you want to be in that range, I suggest that you get your brains assessed even if you do this online. It takes five minutes. We also have at our center the computerized CNS vital signs tool which is a computerized measurement of cognition. With this slide you can see this is one of our Alzheimer’s patients. They can’t perform the tasks of executive functioning which the frontal lobe performs. What we take for granted they completely failed as opposed to somebody with a relatively normal executive functioning. You see how the brain atrophies and the brain atrophy starts in this part of the brain called the medial temporal cortex; that’s the hippocampus. The hippocampus is where we lay down new memories. It has limited capacity but we lay down our new memories in the hippocampus and as the dementing process spreads, it reduces the hippocampal neurogenesis and the nerves start to die but then it’s spread throughout the brain and this is a typical brain with Alzheimer’s. It really is shrunk, it’s quite remarkable, when you see it on MRI and there’s many imaging techniques which are used, MRIs, FDG-PET scans, amyloid PET scans, there’s all kinds of diagnostic tests. We’ve recently introduced in Canada software called the NeuroQuant MRI and this has to be privately ordered. You can’t get this from healthcare, I’ve asked, they won’t do it. But this NeuroQuant MRI actually measures objectively the size of each different area of your brain and compares you to a normative database of particularly the hippocampus and the frontal cortex. These are the two parts that go first, they shrink and we can objectively measure and compare these to other people’s brains. A normal MRI doesn’t do this. Here you can see the hippocampus is reduced. We also do QEEGs, and we can see the brain slowing down, that’s a slowed brainwave that we measure through a QEEG. 

Then we get to Dr. Bresden’s six subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease. Here we really have to understand the different six subtypes to learn how to work them up and how to treat them. If we don’t understand them according to this model, we can’t treat themand so the subtypes are: 

A) Inflammation. Here inflammation is at the root cause of the Alzheimer’s expression, Here, all these inflammatory markers get expressed in APOE4 subtypes. Inflammation is the most important risk factor for that subtype. Here you can see the hippocampus atrophied. We then have to seek out all the causes of that inflammation and all of you know the following triggers very well. Food, gut health, leaky gut, this is at the basis of this inflammatory subtype. We look at the causes of leaky gut, these are all lifestyle issues and we can actually measure how leaky your gut is and how leaky your brain is. You can actually measure now with specific labs the leakiness of your barrier functions and you can measure gut ecology and look at inflammatory factors. You can measure and look at zonulin – the protein that causes leakiness and histamine that makes it worse and then you can actually measure the protein in the lipopolysaccharide coating of bacteria that leak across the gut and cause bacterial endotoxemia and an inflammatory response. These are called LPS lipopolysaccharides. This is the root of many inflammatory brain disorders. Look at all the diseases that get expressed when lipopolysaccharides get expressed.

Then you look at food sensitivities. There are many different ways to look at food sensitivities. Many people come and see me and they have done one IgG test. That’s not it, you have to look at different immunological pathways to look at food expression. One test at our local private lab for IgG foods is not how you work up food sensitivity. You must learn about the other methodologies because they are extremely relevant. One may be positive may be negative in the next test. We also do a whole ton of work around gluten. Gluten as you know, nobody processes gluten well, even if you have or don’t have celiac disease. Even if you have or don’t have gluten sensitivity, nobody has the enzymes to break down the gluten molecule. Nobody. Dr. Fasano the great gluten researcher has said this for 10 years. You get a leaky gut from gluten, now those of you without the bad genes can repair it within hours. But every time you have gluten, you have a leaky gut- quick repair- ok. We measure the gluten molecule in all of its subsets with specialized labs and we measure antibodies to cross-reactive foods. Gluten cross-reacts with different foods. How many of you like coffee? How many of you like coffee and are gluten sensitive? How many of you knew (instant) coffee performs molecular mimicry and ignites the same pathways as gluten may? Just a thought. A particularly horrible thought. And then we can measure antibodies to specific tissue. We can measure antibodies against all of our organs and particularly we can actually measure immune systems attacking of core neurological structures, synapses, tubulins, myelin. You can see how under attack your brain is when you start doing these tests. 

Dentistry. How many of you lump dentistry and health together? How many of you lump dentistry and medicine together? It’s a separated discipline in present ways it is practiced. We can’t work up an Alzheimer’s patient without doing an extensive dental work-up. I do a panorex x-ray and a 3D cone beam CT, looking for periodontal disease, root canals, mercury fillings, dissimilar metals, implants, cavitations. There’s a whole slew of potential toxicity existing in the mouth. Multiple studies show the link between periodontal disease and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. We do peridontal workups.

B). The second subtype is the glycotoxic, the type that causes too much sugar. Sugar as you all know is a potent, potent toxin. It should be a classified substance. 300 years ago, it was sought after like cocaine is today, people would seek it out because they knew how it made you feel- temporarily. Our bodies can’t cope with more than 15 grams of sugar a day. What is in one  sugar soda contain -4200 grams of sugar (not diet). We can’t cope with this huge input of sugar, I mean I know you know formulas but this is the second subtype that causes neurological causes, dementing processes.

C) And then we get the atrophic type, the atrophic type is the type that as the brain ages, it loses neurotropic support, vitamin D, zinc, estrogen, testosterone, pregnenolone, DHEA, all of it gets withdrawn as we age. If there’s one thing in my practice that I enjoy the most, is to see a postmenopausal woman who’s not dementing but she has cognitive decline, go back onto bioidentical hormones and they are so happy. Three months later they come in and the first thing they’ll say, I can’t believe it, I’ve got my brain back. Why? Estrogen is a neurotropic, neuroblastic hormone. It improves synaptic connections and improves dopamine; it changes cognition dramatically. This is the second type. 

D) The third subtype is the subtype that is toxic. This is a subtype of Alzheimer’s, it’s a different presentation of Alzheimer’s. It’s usually in younger people, it’s not so much influenced by the APOE4 gene and they usually present with a lot of frontal lobe symptoms as opposed to the typical hippocampal memory loss. But they do get- the first sign of somebody who’s got a toxic sort of brain is somebody who can’t multitask anymore. They used to do five things and now they can’t, they just have to delegate and that’s one of the first symptoms and we have a whole new world of work being done by Ritchie Shoemaker and others on the chronic inflammatory response syndrome. This is where the innate immune system is upregulated due to mold and Lyme and it causes this very specific profile of inflammation through the innate immune system which affects the brain and effects all the neuro peptides in the brain which regulate leaky gut which regulate hormones which regulate oxygen delivery to mitochondria. This is a whole subset of work that’s going on not in mainstream medicine, you won’t see it, you won’t find it, it’s not there but it’s in the research literature and we do certain things in our clinic to try and find out. We do questionnaires of that particular type, type three chronic inflammatory response. We look at the visual contrast test to see if people fail this test and we do spore counts and mold counts in their homes. Then we look at metals, heavy metals is a big cause and pesticides and air pollution and Lyme disease. How many people will have heard about Lyme disease epidemic, it doesn’t exist in Alberta right? Yeah. My entire day- do day-to-day, week-to-week- is made up by mold and Lyme, toxic people. They travel, they get it from other sources and we believe now the literature’s quite clear that Lyme disease may be transmitted by other factors, and there’s literature here in Calgary by Maureen Middleveen, that it may be sexually transmitted as well. This hasn’t been published in peer-reviewed journals but the literature is out there making those suggestions. With Lyme disease we find the pathogen inside the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. We find herpes simplex 1, the good old cold sore as a big cause. There is also a link between pesticides and Alzheimer’s. Glyphosate. How many of you eat organic food? Even organic food is riddled with glyphosate because of cross-contamination. It’s everywhere. Glyphosate is highly toxic to many core organs. It causes gut permeability; it shuts down neuronal pathways. 

E) Then the vascular subtype is with people with hypertension and atherosclerosis which decreases oxygen supply to the brain causing Alzheimer’s decline. 

F) And then we get the traumatic subtyppe; the brain injured people; I mean look at these statistics. Not all head trauma patients will develop Alzheimer’s, but there is 2.3 times increase incidence in mild or moderate traumatic brain injury. 4.5 increase in severe brain trauma. There are no studies linking mild brain injury to Alzheimer’s disease, but three or more concussions -a fivefold higher incidence for memory loss and cognitive impairment.

I’m out of time. Well there’s a whole slew of lab tests you can do to sort of think through this problem. You won’t get it under health care, you won’t get it from your family doctor, in fact you’ll get dismissed so it’s up to you to educate yourself. Dr. Bredesen’s book The End of Alzheimer’s is fabulous, I suggest you read it and you start working through your own cognoscopies, how you can work yourself up to see if you’re at risk and then therapeutically there’s at least 36 things you can do to down regulate cognitive decline and/or Alzheimer’s of which- guess what’s number one? Nutrition. 

One last word, ketogenic diets seems to trump every other diet when to comes to changing brain outcomes. Combine that with good sleep, exercise, stress reduction, you’ve got the four pillars of turning down mild cognitive decline of potential dementia, and then you can look at all the other factors with influence outcomes and just teach yourself because nobody out there is going to teach it to you and you definitely won’t get it from your medical doctors. So thank you very much. Thank you.

Judith Cobb:

Thank you, Dr. Hoffman, that was amazing. If you have questions please come and use the mic, we have about 8 minutes for questions, and at 9:30 you might get cut off right in the middle because we’ll be live streaming with Toronto, so questions?

Question:

Just a quick one, I know vitamin D is a really controversial item right now and is limited in information especially with auto-immunity, so what do you recommend for dosing, food versus supplements in the grocery list this summer?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So, those are the  foods that contain vitamin D, this is how you can calculate your vitamin D needs, but I can tell you it’s not that accurate. Every Calgarian that I’ve ever seen who’s not on vitamin D supplements is vitamin D deficient, everyone. But you can’t tell them how much to take because everybody has a variation in the amount they need, depending on A) The VDR gene receptors which is from the 23andme gene test. because the people with a VDR plus plus gene need a lot more vitamin D. The state of the small intestines is where you absorb vitamin D and many people have very disrupted small intestines, and they have SIBO and small bowel SIFO with fungal overgrowth and they don’t absorb the D vitamin and you need the D vitamin and you need a lot of oil. In fact, Vit D – this is a fat-soluble vitamin. I can’t tell you how many people are fatty acid deficient, the majority of people by far. Everybody’s taking omega-3s, that’s epidemic right now, everybody comes in taking fish oil- fish oil isn’t it. It’s got benefits but you need your omega-3, your sixes, your nines, your mono and saturate fats; your saturates in order to absorb vitamin D and vitamin A and vitamin E which are fat soluble. So, to answer that question is complex but patients hate me, they always ask me questions and I say “I’m not sure, it’s complex”, they go “give me an answer”. Then I will do a ten minute explanation, and they go “oh I see”. So that’s the kind of complexity that this requires to answer that question.

Question:

For people in our industry, it’s really hard for us to help with stuff like this especially now that Alberta does not test vitamin D, so how do you recommend we help people that do come to us with these issues when we can’t convince them to their doctor to get tested for this?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

So, it’s a great question. First of all, you can get vitamin D tested just so you know, there’s a trick. Yes, the trick you got to have a friendly GP who’s going to lie and say you’ve got celiac disease or malabsorption syndrome or osteoporosis. They need to sign a form, if they sign the form you can get it done, but I can tell you from my experience, none of them will, but if you have a good relationship with them and you can prove to them that there’s a need, they will do it for you. If you put a circle where it shouldn’t be and you don’t cross the box where it should be, you’ll be rejected. It’s that weird, that’s firstly. Secondly you can get vitamin D from private labs so people have to spend out of pocket. 

This notion of having Canadian healthcare pay for your functional medicine and wellbeing, please give it up, it’s not going to happen. You have to have health as an extremely high value and you have to invest in your health with your own after-tax dollars because they won’t let you deduct it in order to maximize your health outcomes. Please don’t think that Alberta health care is going to do this for you and I don’t think they should by the way. People always feel almost shattered when I say that. The disease based system,  we already pay exorbitant taxes to fund the free health care and they do a good job of you know, when we have a heart attack and go to the emergency and we get 5-star treatment and intensive care. Don’t try and muddy the waters asking that system which treats tertiary disease, to start doing preventative medicine overnight. I think it will creep in overtime but if you want them to do functional medicine and preventive medicine and start to fund what you do your taxes will be 95%. It can’t happen, so please be responsible, get rid of an adolescent fantasy that health care should take care of all this, it won’t and I don’t think it can afford to. You have to have health as a high value, you have to invest in yourself, you have to educate yourself,  you have to become your own patient advocate and you have to do what it takes to get you where you need to go.

Question:

Hello, outside of MRIs, EEGs, CAT scans and others in our regular system, how do you feel about the spec imaging, neurospec imaging?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Neurospec imaging? It’s not- it’s generalized but it’s not specific. You can see signs and symptoms, you can see certain images like you know the ring of fire, Daniel Amen’s. It’s not specific but it is done. PET scans, more accurate and some of the more advanced PET scans are more accurate. Neurospec is sort of a secondary test, I wouldn’t use it as a primary test unless you got free access.

Question:

Hi, I just saw on a slide that you said with inflammation it had to do with Pitta and Ayurveda and what the relationship was there?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

Are you familiar with the Ayurveda? So, I evaded talking about doshas- doshas are constellations of elements, vata is air and space, pitta is fire. What is inflammation? Fire, too much fire.

Question:

So, someone with Pitta is more susceptible to Alzheimer’s?

Dr. Bruce Hoffman:

I don’t know if that’s statistically true, but theoretically of the subtype one, inflammation, I would say, I would posit a guess, I don’t think studies have been done- now Bredesen knows a bit about Ayurveda.  I was astonished that he did, so I would think they may be something to that, there may be literature on that  that but I can’t say for sure, but it makes sense. Pita is the hardest to treat by the way. 

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