Prevent Alzheimer's: Brain Health Warning Signs And Anti-Aging Techniques | Dr. Leroy Hood

I'll tell you the most uh famous of all the users of brain HQ is uh Tom Brady who in his later years used brain HQ one to increase his reaction time and two to increase his depth of field and it worked magnificently all right so welcome uh to the Dr hary podcast it's great to have you back on it's a pleasure to be here as always so uh you know as you heard from the introduction uh Dr hood is an iconic guy in the history of medicine and he's literally like the Forest Gump of scientific discoveries of the last 50 years and he's been there at the beginning of everything including the beginning of bioeng engineering and understanding how to use technology to sequence DNA and peptides he was there at the beginning of the Human Genome Project conception uh he's developed the whole field of cross disciplinary biology which allows us to cross over fields and understand biology in a much more complex way uh he's sort of the father of sisters biology and 21st century medicine and this whole new concept of scientific wellness and so he's really kind of been at the intersection of much of what's happened in the last uh 50 60 years in medicine that hasn't quite reached the bedside yet but will very soon and we're going to talk about what that's going to look like and where medicine is going right now you know we can't really imagine what's coming in five or 10 years just is in you know 2005 nobody could imagine a smartphone or basically just all the social media we have today or the technology we have and virtual reality and AI it was sort of just this vague concept but it now it's part of everyday life and I think this soon will be part of our everyday life and medicine will be radically transformed um and and uh Dr hood has also sort of developed this incredible new project at the young age of 85 uh called Phenom heal Health which we're going to talk about and Phenom health is essentially a way to map out every conceivable aspect of your biology and to through computational biology and Ai and machine learning make sense of it all and find out how to understand what's going on really at the core of your biology all the intersecting complexity that makes you you and how you're unique and how you need to personalize your own health journey and disease repair Journey it's going to radically change everything know so um Le I'm just excited to have you here because you know you you've basically been there in the beginning I I I read a a textbook chapter you wrote talking about the seven Paradigm shifts that are driving 21st century medicine so I wonder if you could kind of quickly take us through what those are I sort of alluded to them a little bit and where you've been in them but I think it's sort of all leading to this moment we have right now which is a moment of of a radical reimagination of the science of medicine which will lead lead us to a reimagination of the practice of medicine and we're going to talk about what that looks like so can you take us through a little bit of that that amazing history that you've been through personally and that you've actually LED uh it's a pleasure when I went to Caltech in 1970 as an assistant professor I was interested in biology and and somewhat overwhelmed with its enormous complexity and that led me to thinking about things that led to success of series of paradigms changes and I think at that time there were three things that I realized were important one humans are complex and the only way we're going to solve the problems of complexity is with big data we have to be able to decipher it in order to understand the causal events that lead to Wellness or disease and so forth number two it's really important to realize the blood is a wonderful window into health and disease molecules from all organs are secreted into the blood and if you can read those molecules out you can assess the complexity of the whole organism from the blood itself and the third thing was look this is an enormous amount of data how in the world can we possibly handle it and that was the beginning of systems biology the ideal that you idea you need global uh comprehensive uh dynamical sets of data to be able to translate data Digital Data into biological networks that underpin physiology and disease that is Wellness uh and and disease and it was with this start then in the first Paradigm change my lab over the years developed six instruments for reading and writing DNA and most important of course was the automated DNA sequencer which made possible the second Paradigm change which was the Human Genome Project and that was interesting because 12 of us were invited to Santa Cruz in 1985 to pass judgment on the Human Genome Project and the two major conclusions we reached are one it would be technically possible that so challenging and two we were split six to six on whether it was a good idea those against said this is big biology it'll take money from Little science we can't have this happening and it took five years to convince the world that the Genome Project should be done the third Paradigm change you'd actually mentioned and that was the idea in order to create all these instruments I had to get engineers and mathematicians and scientists and computer scientists and and all and it seemed to me the most logical way to do that wasn't in one big lab like mine but rather to create a new department that was cross disciplinary and biology at Caltech absolutely vetoed that idea so Bill Gates made it possible to go to the University of Washington and have a shot at it anyway and I'll say we created a department that was enormously successful called molecular biotechnology and it pioneered major instruments in genomics and cell biology and biochemistry and so forth and and computational methods the two major computational techniques of the Genome Project came out of uh of that uh lab but but what I came to realize was the bureaucracy of a big state school made it virtually impossible to do Innovative new things and my policy has always been if you have a really new idea you can't do it out of an old bureaucracy yeah so I started the institute for systems biology and that really over the last 20 some years has successfully pioneered the whole vision of systems biology and applied it both to uh wellness and disease and of course the the final Paradigm change had to do with the realization in 2014 that we ought to apply this big data to individual human beings in populations and from that began to deduce their health status and how to optimize that health status and that worked in a project of 108 individuals in 2014 we started a company called aavil 201 uh 15 to 19 that collected 5,000 individuals in their genome and phenome data and from that have come almost 30 different papers and major journals each giving us an idea about a story of Wellness Andor of prevention and how we can go about absolutely leading to the final Paradigm change which is the idea we're going to replace a disease oriented uh Health Care system with one that focuses on wellness and prevention yeah this is really profound I mean you know when I think about human biology and I I remember you know uh reading this book cons ilence by IO Wilson where he talked about the fact that we have no theory of medicine that it's just a descriptive reactive sort of practice exactly really doesn't represent the underlying biology and so we kind of navigate illness in a very clumsy way from the chronic disease perspective I mean what we had in early 20th century medicine was a wonderful approach to infectious disease to sanitation to Public Health it enormous advantages in our lifespan and and quality of health and vitamin deficiencies and all that was wonderful and then we sort of seemed to think that that same approach would work for chronic disease and it just doesn't and at all it doesn't at all and you know we're doing spending more and more getting less and less and we're we're it's a frightening trajectory when we look at the fact that you know 34% of of the population a third more than a third of the population will be over 65 by 2050 with now six and 10 Americans having chronic disease and over 65 it's more than that so it's it's kind of a terrifying trajectory if we don't think differently about the problem and and what you've done is really created a model of how we think differently about the nature of Health the nature of disease and in fact coin this term scientific Wellness which kind of upends our whole approach in medicine from one focused on diseases to one focused on the science of Wellness or health how do we Define it how do we measure it how do we track it how do we modify it how do we understand the diseases just boom happen one day to the next it's actually Continuum from optimal illness all the way to some slight perturbations in our biochemistry and ibiology to full-blown disease and you know when you think about you know your iPhone it's an incredibly uh complicated system but it's it's not as complex as the human body I think of it maybe it's like an etch of sketch when you think about how it compares to the complexity of the body which is chemistry biology physics and literally I don't know if I got this number right but it's I think last I read about it it was 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second in the body which which is something Beyond any capacity of any human to understand or think about and so what what you really mapped out and what you're now doing using this sort of integration of we call Deep phenotyping which is collecting all the data you can on somebody you know there are blood work their Quantified Self biosensor metrics their their genomics their metabolomics their microbiomics all of it uh literally everything you can think about and scooping it up and looking at the data in way that is informed by knowledge informed by a framework of thinking but also sees patterns and relationships and creates predictive models for things that we couldn't even imagine before so it's it's such an ex it's such an exciting moment and and yet we're basically my daughter's a thir year medical school right now and it's it's it's frustrating for me that that she's learning what she's learning and I talked to her about this stuff and she's like I don't know what you're talking about Dad I'm learning about diseases and rheumatoidarthritis and diabetes and cancer and you know dementia but not really understanding what's really happening so can you talk about you know what what is actually um going to be this process of transitioning from a disease care system to a true Health Care system to measuring Health how do we even think about measuring it because we're seeing all these revolutions happening right on the omix Revolution and the ability to understand all these different data points that are tracked through our were bus or glucose monitors and using systems medicine which is sort of the extension of systems biology right right using Ai and ml to actually make sense of of all this and how how is this going to change the medical industry and and why why are these things so essential to a wellness centered future so I would make a couple of points one if you really want to assess and optimize Wellness you need metrics for wellness and what absolutely fascinating is three different metrics have emerged for wellness out of the araville population uh that we've analyzed and the first metric is a metric called your biological age it's the age your body says you are as opposed to what your birthday says you are so the further you are away below your chronologic age the more effectively you're aging and what we demonstrated for aavil is for every year a woman stayed in aavil she lost 1.8 years of biological age for every year a man stayed in he lost 08 years and I had a good friend who went through the airfl program and lost 10 years of biological age now the long enough he'd be 5 years old 5 years old exactly but the converse was also true we looked at 40 some diseases in this population and virtually for everyone your biological age was above your chronologic age when you came back to normal it reduced down so here is a metric for wellness that is going to allow us to assess wellness and how effective your aging what did you was it was it was it uh DNA methylation or was it some other calculus no these were analytes from the blood and we showed you could do it with proteins you could do it with clinical chemistries or you could do it with metabolites and the most effective was doing having an algorithm with metabolites because that gave you Clues both as to how your different major organs were aging your liver your kidney your immune system and so forth and it gave you hints as to what you could do to optimize the AG process so that's one metric a second metric which we just is that something is that something that some people can get is that is that a metric or you just something you need it is a metric you can get actually we licens this metric to Thorn and I think for $89 you can get your biological age done and it gives you at the same time the age of your major organ so it's a it's an enormously useful asset so it's different than the one that were developed for example from the Horath clock and epigenetic aging and DNA methylation or Morgan lavine's calculated ones that's based on wider ranges of D methylation patterns yeah the methylation patterns I think can accurately assess biological age they can't give you recommendations so one of the advantages is having the analytes that give you the recommendations and just to be clear for people listening metabolites basically all the molecules and chemicals and compounds that your body has floating around the blood that regulate everything and when you go to your doctor you get like you know 20 or 30 analytes but there're maybe thousands or tens of thousands of these in your blood and that now we can start to measure these through something called metabolomics which is not part of your regular blood work right so we typically do a thousand different metabolites and a thousand different lipids and thousands of different proteins and measuring the blood from uh individual uals and you're able to track how those track against biological and how they change and they give you insights into into how to optimize Wellness absolutely but I I just wanted to say a second metric that I think is going to be equally important is your biological BMI um basil metabolic index which classically was determined by measures of your height and your weight yeah and it turns out it's inaccurate it doesn't respond to changes it incorrectly classifies for example really muscular people turn out to be extremely obese by this criteria whereas the metabolic BMI that we use from making analyses with the metabolites is spoton with all of those things and it actually gives us insights into populations that are somewhat diseased metabolically that aren't detected by the oldfashioned one and it allows us actually to stratify obese patients into really interesting classes that give you insights on how you can think about treatment and things like that so but this isn't a DEA body composition this is using metabol is a measurement right out of your blood that assesses many different things I mean the really nice thing about the metabolites is you you can make hundreds of measurements to assess this one factor that gives you an assessment of and it turns out that metabolic diseases are intrinsic to diabetes they're intrinsic to neurologic degenerative diseases and so forth and they play a fundamental role in in cancers as well so they're they're very widespread so having a good metric is great and the final measurement we can make from blood uh analytes is we can actually assess the diversity in your gut microbiome and that's key because the more diverse you are the healthy you are so uh if you can't do the gut microbiome test you can do uh a quantitative test with blood metabolites and boom you get your gut diversity so those are three metrics we can use to follow patients really effectively for the future so that's one thing I think the second thing before before you before you go on I just want to highlight what you just said because I don't want to skip over it what Dr Hood just said is you can take a blood sample and measure what's going on in your gut that the metabolites from your poop essentially are absorbed across your gut lining end up in your blood and we can measure those and and I've heard estimates it's anywhere from a third to half of all the metabolites in your blood maybe from the microbiome which plays an enormous role in every part of your health Journey from every disease we can think of pretty much unless you get you know hit by a car pretty much every other disease is connected to the microbiome so it's really a profound thing that you can just get a blood test and look at that so you're looking at at your biological age you're looking at metabolic health and you're looking at uh your your microbiome as metrics to track your health and wellness and deviations from health because you're not actually often measuring a disease with those analytes you're just measuring deviations from health or little things that are off right on that trajectory right right so I cut you off what are we gonna say next I just I just didn't want to skip over that because no that's a really important point so in a sense I I wanted to emphasize the fact that there are three axes to health one of which is virtually entirely ignored in today's Health practice for the most part so health of your brain health of your body and health of your gut micro biome all three of them seamlessly integrate together and they're all absolutely critical in optimizing wellness and I think the health of the brain is uh is one to really emphasize in the sense I can ask most people when's the last time their doctor asked them how their brain was doing and the answer of course is never and right and the fact is your brain is is an organ just like your heart that needs exercise Michael merenik a close friend who got the kevi prize for for brain plasticity demonstrated beautifully for an ordinary person your cognitive features rise to a maximum in your mid-30s and for most of it they fade away what Michael demonstrated is he has measurements to assess and replace loss function so you can take an 80-year-old and with most of them restore them back to where they might have been in their mid-30s so it's enormous hope for all of us a series of assays called brain HQ and if there's one thing I'd urge you to do to actually exercise your brain and really effective manner with regard to its cognitive features it's uh it's brain agq made by a company called posit posit that you can look up but let me put link to that the show not so that's really important because we'll put that link to that it's basically like you know crossword puzzles on steroids and it's it's a way to increase neuroplasticity by using mental exercises and brain training just like you go to the gym for your muscles you got to go to the gym for your brain and that's what this is well I'll tell you the most uh famous of all the users of brain HQ is uh Tom Brady who in his later years used brain HQ one to increase his reaction time and two to increase his depth of field and it worked magnificently and he's really Seven Super Bowl rings yeah so look all you aspiring 30y olds who would like to continue doing this there's a chance to exercise your brain that's so great and I I would say the the final point I would make about data is The genome and phenome data is an enormous amount of information obviously so what we've begin to use are the tools of hi and these include knowledge graphs that connect together all sorts of different types of data they include digital twins that that incorporate highlevel physiologic data and mechanisms with omic data and those kinds of things to give us the power to make predictions about diseases such as Alzheimer's and finally they include these large language models and we're now learning how to use those three features to convert the Digital Data of your genome and phenome into language like data that large language models can use so in the future what we hope to be able to do are two really important things one take your genome phenome data and put it in this AI device and have it read out in prioritized order literally hundreds of actionable possibilities you can carry out to optimize your Wellness starting with the most important ones of course right and then two what we will be able to do is send to your physique position those actionable possibilities on the one hand explaining them for the physician and what needs to be done but on the other hand providing the clinical evidence that says these are legitimate actionable possibilities and can you imagine being you know what's really interesting about the genome and phenome is it's exactly like Michel Angelo's statement about a block of granite where he said David is in there all I have to do is Chip Away on the edges and we'll have a David well the genome and phenome can assess from your data your current health your health trajectory and tell you how to optimize it and that's where we're going to be going in the future and that's where we'll have an health care that more and more becomes focused at home with your cell phone and other similar devices that let you expand your health span out into the 90s or even hundreds that is the stage of your life where you're healthy and active aggressive and the interesting question is what are you going to do with the extra 20 years and I'll bet you'll get bored just playing tennis and go but maybe that's not true some people no I'm going to be 5 this year and I just climbed a mountain in Patagonia and it was 15 miles uh in a day and it was one 5,000 feet of elevation only a mile up and a mile down and I read afterwards that it was a two-day normally a two-day trip and we did it in one day and it was it was so you're good you're in great shape I'm in good shape yeah I'm in good shape and you know so I think I just want to sort of pause for a minute because what you said there was so important I'm not sure everybody get I just want to see if if I got it clear so first of all the the genome is your genes they're fixed your phenome is the expression of your genes based on everything that's happened to you in your life what you've eaten how much you exercised your thoughts your relationships your environment exposure to toxins your microbiome all that washes over you to determine the expression at this moment of who you are do you have diabetes are you healthy or fit and that's what we call the phenome and that can be measured and that's changeable and this is what Dr hood is talking about is is how we can change our phenomic health and and and reverse our trajectory towards disease and actually go back towards health and even Optimal Health and scientific wellness and you're talked about three key things which I think are really important you know one is is this idea of knowledge graphs and I and and then digital Twins and and lastly um the the a machine learning that goes to sort of sort through it all large language models and large language model so how and how do how do you define a knowledge graph for people listening I don't think most people familiar with that what is a Knowledge Graph and what is a digital twin and and tell us a little bit more about those because that's those are really important Concepts because what you're talking about is essentially Revolution medicine rather than doing large randomized controlled trials with thousands of people and millions of dollars we're going to be able to do research in a very different way that's based in what we call n of one research you're you're at the end which means number one and it's basically research on you and the NIH has validated this as one of the highest levels of research and evidence but we don't really take it we call it anecdotes but really there's a whole scientific field of n ofone research so can you kind of unpack knowledge graphs digil Twins and and then and then explain how machine learning Ai and large Lang midle large language models will will help us understand all that sure so a knowledge graph is nothing more than going to the medical literature and it's putting in graphical form the relationships between Gene and proteins and RNA and disease and different kinds of of U physiologic States and so forth so and and in a sense you've got a gene as a feature that is connected by a whole series of edges to the things that it actually causes one way or another so the knowledge graph takes medical knowledge and it creates all the interrelating connections to it and the usefulness of that is we can actually take your digital information and we can map it right onto a Knowledge Graph and in doing so we interconnect you with virtually the entire literature of modern medicine so that gives us en Norm insights on your specific and unique relationships to uh to being a human being and so forth so the digital twin on the other hand usually has an area that it's interested in and and the one that we've worked on with collaborators is brain health and the idea there is you bring in all of the physiologic information at the top with all of the little differential equations about how the brain works and everything and from the bottom you tie that to omix and to clinical chemistry and all the other things and this digital twin thus is a repository of information States for brain Wellness for Alzheimer's for uh other Parkinson's other kinds of diseases and what it enables one to do then is on the one hand you can create a million vir virtual digital twins modifying different aspects of those relationships to see for example what is most useful in extending the period of time before you get in transition to Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or things like that so it gives you relationships to disease and we're going to be doing one for wellness which will give us the Myriad of relationships for different aspects it's almost like an avatar of yourself that you get to do research on and figure out what's going test out different IDE make predictions and you can use the digital twin because it gives you mechanistic information to say phospha Coline is really great for delaying the onset of Alzheimer's that yeah an observation that was made with the uh the the wellness digital twin and it's a very very powerful tool for thinking about how to delay and or even ultimately to prevent the onset of the disease it's been designed to do yeah we're running a big clinical trial with very dense data on diabetes and we are at the same time making a digital twin now for diabetes as well so we can incredible optimize what we've learned most effectively to come back to patients and say here are the things you need to do to avoid these consequences so it allow you to really fulfill the dream that you've had which is P4 medicine it's personalized right it's predictive uh it's preventive and it's predatory because then you have to do what the data say which is change what you're doing in terms of what you're eating and your lifestyle or treatments or drugs or whatever the right approach is so it's really fulfilling this Vision that you've had for years and really was uh was so exciting for me to hear as a practicing physician as someone who was trying to work in this area of systems thinking in biology and Medicine uh Network medicine functional medicine whatever you want to call it it's really you know the name doesn't matter it's it's this idea that the body is one interconnected ecosystem it's a big biological Network it's a network of networks and unless we get that and understand that we're not going to be able to solve the problem of chronic disease we're going to be throwing drugs at it we're going to be spending lots of money we're not going to get any better care and we're seeing that we're spending more money than any other Nation we're getting worse outcomes Medicare Coster skyrocketing and and we're we're kind of on a sinking ship so this really what you're talking about is a revolution that's going to change all that if it can get adopted the the thing I worry about is the adoption rate that you know what we're talking about essentially is an AI co-pilot for your health for you for your self-care and for your doctor to actually use as a co-pilot for their care because there's no way they're going to understand all this either because the smartest doctor in the world doesn't know every single gene or every single metabolite or every single protein but uh the computer can well let me say a word or two about that because I have thought about that I remember when for the first time computer beat a a Chessmaster equivocally and could beat him every time and what happened is that Chessmaster said well if I can't beat the computer maybe I can join the computer and the two of us together can beat any other individuals or any other computers and he proved it was true this chimeric relationship of a human who was unbounded in creative thinking and a computer who could do all the calculations and estimate the moves and roots and all of those kind of thing that worked absolutely beautifully so what I see is doctors becoming partners with AI because what AI will be able to give the doctor is essentially the equivalent of domain expertise in all fields of medicine that means you can give your patients the treatment that experts in 50 different fields would give them you alone can do that and uniquely offer up uh a a kind of medicine we've only dreamed about in the past but to do it you have to be willing to be a partner with this computer and and you want to check the computer and make sure uh everything is is uh is standard and and okay in everything but the idea that we can use then AI to create super docks and make them incredibly efficient it has I think enormous implications for I mean you're G to you're going to convert family practitioners into the equivalent for domain expertise in all fields of medicine which is has to be an exciting idea for them that's pretty exciting yeah it reminds me of you know being a family doctor in a small town in Idaho where we were the only practitioners there was five of us one one drunk surgeon and five family doctors and and things would come in that I'd never seen before or extremely complicated cases or high-risk situations like you know premature neonatal birth where I'd have to you know take care of a neonate uh that would normally be taken care of in a tertiary care hospital because there was nowhere near it to take care of them and I would literally call the doctor in the the next uh biggest town which is like two or three hours away and I would talk to the Specialists and they would guide me exactly what to do but think of this on steroids that's what you're talking about is it's like not just one doctor steroids steroids and it's it's really an exciting thing because you know when you go to the doctor you're just getting their experience their residency their experience with patients a very limited set of data but you know you know right now we're seeing this in medicine with radiology and Opthalmology and dermatology where literally you know AI has seen billions of images of skin lesions whereas a dermatologist might see thousands in their life they're seeing billions and they're able to track it and do a much better job and and it's not that the the computer is going to be doing your skin biopsy but it's helping the doctor decide which leads you into biopsy which what's what yeah right's absolutely so it's it's so exciting I I think you know getting getting specific now you know you you basically um talk about this concept of scientific wellness and getting a yearly checkup and blood draw and look at where you are in the trajectory of your biological age your current trajectory toward disease and and you're saying you we're able to track things and and actually make a difference like reversing diabetes getting rid of cancer avoiding or preventing or even reversing Alzheimer's uh reversing autoimmune diseases these are really kind of big claims and I you know you're not you're not a kind of an Internet influencer who's you know basically read a book and all of a sudden got a million followers and telling people what to do you're one of the leading scientists of this of this generation and you're talking about this concept in a way that's really scientific and so the the Principles of Scientific Wellness seem to be offering a breakthrough in a lot of conditions Alzheimer's particularly that this is the one you worked on and so you give us an example and walk through how how this idea that you have created Works in something like Alzheimer and how it's led to a breakthrough in in your thinking about this and how it works as a model then for fighting other chronic diseases or addressing other chronic diseases well I can uh give you a personal story on Alzheimer's my wife in 2005 was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and of course that uh as with all families so diagnosed had a profound impact and one aspect of it was I decided I'd learn everything there was about Alzheimer's which was really pretty depressing that at that point were there were two uh two things that you could give them that looked like they work for very short periods of time if at all and then I really came to the conclusion the drugs were given mostly for the doctor's sake not for the make them feel like they were doing something right but it you know it's a it's a progressive kind of disease but I met uh in uh 2010 112 Dale breson who was a Pioneer in thinking about Alzheimer's from a systems point of view and you know he had this wonderful analogy of the barn roof with 38 holes and those were the deficiencies that Alzheimer's patients had and you had to replace those holes with with the appropriate chemicals and in his particular case and and you know Dale never really provided the hardcore classic evidence of randomized clinical trials but it turns out almost certainly he was right there was a trial later from Finland called the finger trial finger trial that showed for example exercise and diet had two enormous impacts on Alzheimer's disease and the how long it took to to get it under the even Richard isaacson's work also showed that you could you know impact and reverse it by using a kind of personaliz and it's been confirmed many times over so I think the idea that and I'll tell you the digital twin has more than anything else given us a wonderful beginning mechanistic understanding of Alzheimer's disease and shown that basically it's a disease your metabolism and it really has to do a lot with the failure to be able to deal with LDL cholesterol really effectively and the the gene that predisposes most to alzheimer's apoe4 is a gene that manages that whole cholesterol process and all so anyway we have really wonderful new mechanistic insights but I think for Alzheimer's there there are two really key points one is what are the earliest easily detectable signs that a transition has occurred for example with a type of scanning called metabolic pet scanning Mike Phelps demonstrated you could actually see changes in your brain metabolism 15 years before before you got diagnosed with Alzheimer's so I'd like to find a blood marker that does that same thing in a simple nonradioactive Manner and everything and we're going to be setting up next a clinical trial on Alzheimer's and a major focus is going to be the early detection of the earliest transitions because when we detect markers for the transitions they'll give us Clues as to what's gone wrong and we'll be able to reverse the disease at that early stage but a big part of reversing Alzheimer's I'll tell you is dealing with exercise dealing with diet dealing with Pro it's absolutely routine things that are under our own control that can make a big difference in addition to the medical things we'll be discovering as we go on yeah you're right so anyway my my real hope and my family for example has this apoe4 Gene and my son for example is homozygous for it so that is yeah a very high risk for Alzheimer's by the time he's in his 60s or so and what he's doing now that really looks like it's doing a superb job is dealing with diet in major ways uh dealing with exercise he's an exercise fanatic anyway yeah yeah he runs Ultra marathons to give you an idea so he's he's in great shape but and he's doing an analysis of his metabol but his dad's 85 and does 100 push-ups a day right so I do 150 a day we we 150 man I'm slacking jeez I got to catch up so anyway well he's he's a tremendous athlete so he'll he'll be able to do that at 85 too well what you're talking about is so important because we're we're we're so in the Dark Ages now we wait till we have symptoms and you're talking about with these metabolic scans detecting changes that happened decades before that we can do something about through lifestyle through exercise diet and I you know I don't know if you know the story but I I wrote a book more of 15 years ago called the ultra mind solution which was a description of how the brain is influenced by everything that goes on in the body and that that we often mistakenly attribute meaning to things like depression or anxiety or add or Alzheimer's that that really have nothing to do with the cause and that these conditions are have multiple causes uh like the 36 holes in the roof or 38 holes and then you have to deal with all of them in order for getting people better and you have to look deeply at what's going on in their biology and I you know I think you know when we typically have an Alzheimer's workup and in today's neurology it's just you know you check your B12 your thyroid you know a few other things it's pretty superficial and neur neurocognitive testing and you can see that they have dementia but it just tells you what they have it doesn't tell you why and I when I wrote that book uh know I I was influenced by my patients who would come to me with Alzheimer's or Autism or ADD and I would see these radical changes in them when I started to just fix all the holes I optimized her gut health I they were nutritionally deficient in B vitamins they needed vitamin D they had heavy metals I would get rid of those they were pre-diabetic I would fix that with diet and lifestyle and I I had a patient who had a double um apoe4 uh Gene homoy the the rist gene um he was about 70 years old he had really significant cognitive impairment couldn't work anymore he was a civil company he was depressed his family didn't want to be around him because he was acting crazy and really kind of gone pretty far along and we found out that he he you know lived in Pittsburgh where they actually coat the streets with coal dust in the winter instead of salt for ice and you know Cole is essentially full of mercury and Lead he also right right that was also where us steel is and they have these factories that spew out coal effluent which is full of mercury and lead and he also had a mouthful of fillings and so forth so I checked his Mercury level it was off the chart um we treated that we treated his insulin resistance which was was severe he had years of gut issues we know the microbiome plays a role in Alzheimer's we optimize his gut health his bacterial overgrowth he had high homines we had problems with methylation again B12 folate deficiency we just kind of worked on everything and he literally woke up like Ben we call and was able to function again and be part of his business again and be with his family again and I was like holy crap what is going on here I just I'm just applying these basic principles of treating the system not the symptoms treating the and and so I wrote this book and then Dale's wife I don't if you know this she's a functional medicine doctor she read the book she gave it to Dale he read the book he's like oh my god I've been in the lab I need to this make so much sense I'm going to show this as true so he took that and actually ended up that's where he started oh right interesting story that's right that's right and so um I mean I obviously can't take all the credit because he's got a lot further with it but it was just my clinical observations that people had so many different things going on and so this is the future of healthcare rather than a single drug for a single disease it's a m multimodal interventions meaning multiple things at the same time to fix the things that are wrong and they're going to be different for each person there's no such thing as Alzheimer's there are many variations and individual subtypes and individual abnormalities that are unique to each person whether it's with diabetes or heart disease or Alzheimer's or cancer and we're we're labeling people with these diseases that it's almost meaningless today I don't care what the name of the disease is I want to know what's going on underneath the hood and then actually it's like say you have a red car well is it a is it a Porsche or is it a Volkswagen or is it a Ford you know it's like okay well we we'll fix what's under the hood we won't worry about what the hood says yeah exactly exactly so I I think this is it's such an exciting moment in medicine and I I think I'm so excited about the things you're discovering because it's it's translating into you know a different way of thinking about disease which is the problem I think in medicine we have a thinking problem and and you know I don't know how you've come to be so open-minded and have such a vision of the future and you know it's it's really often dealing in entrenched ways with the current Paradigm you know I think Thomas wrote about this in the structure of scientific revolutions re normal science and how tough it is to change scientists way of thinking about a problem and it often you know has to wait till they die and get new version of it and I I think uh this is coming fast so can you tell us you know all the work you've done and everything that you're doing now with the Phenom health project how far are we from actually getting this into uh the clinic the bedsite or even bypassing the healthcare system and people be able to use this for their own self assessment and Care well I think uh let me just say that we're taking two major approaches to phenomics one is with individuals to optimize their wellness and prevent disease and the second is with disease to use big data to understand it in ways we've never understood it before yeah in that latter case we're starting a diabetes trial uh within the month and we'll be starting an Alzheimer's trial within hopefully uh six months to nine months uh these are a big expensive trials but they'll tell us more in a four-year period than we've learned in the last 50 years about the inner workings of all these things so phenomics I think from the disease point of you is uh and and there are many people doing these kinds of studies at different levels so it's uh but on the individual level I think we're actually talking with the health care System uh we haven't come to a final agreement but we we basically agreed to start with their uh Executive Health program and then move down to their family practice program and if a major Health Care system takes this on and over a period of five years shows that everything works as it did for arael I think we'll be well on our way to convincing the Skeptics and so forth but I I do want to say one of the proposals I've made is this idea that we do a second Genome Project which is called the human phenome initiative where we analyze at government expense a million people over a 10year period and that will do three things one it will unequivocally demonstrate an enormous increase in quality of datadriven Health number two we can show cost savings that are going to be staggering from preventing chronic diseases by that time and and again 86% of our health care budget is spent on chronic diseases so if we can begin to eliminate diabetes and uh Alzheimer's and other heart disease yeah heart disease and and Cancers it's going to have a major impact and the third thing is we'll optimize the phenomic analyses so most of them in the future can be done at home and and your health will be an aspect of your home and so forth and you know I would just like to make a word about uh health and how important it is because Health underpins all of the uniquely human qualities that we treasure your early development your education your work and your jobs your community and uh communication with others but creativity and thinking out of the box and all of these things and most important it's going to really expand your health span as I said into the 90s or even hundreds and if you have a purpose and a commitment to life you'll be able to use all the wisdom you've accumulated uh during your earlier lifetime to really benefit societ at the end and that's where I think we need to have an education program that begins to have people thinking about this in their teens and not wait until they're in their 80s or 70s or 60s uh to think about it I think with any Paradigm change education is utterly critical unless you want to wait forever yeah well people I think are are scared of AI and and there's been a lot of fear-mongering around it and I think it is a concern in many ways although right now a lot of our life is driven by AI algorithms that determine what we see on social media on Netflix and you know it's like we're already we're already being gobbled up our data is being gobbled up by Ai and and being directed at us uh but people worry about it in other ways I understand that and and I think in health care it's one of the use cases that I I'm most excited about and I think has the potential to help us like you said have an AI co-pilot for doctors and for individuals and you know I think in the company I co-founded called function Health we're basically creating a model where we're being to allow people to get access to their own data it's democratized they they can have an interpretive model that actually is based on the evidence based on their own biology that allows them to see where they are the trajectory and modify things to change their life and it's it's so exciting I think you know you mentioned this million iners project isn't that all of us there's an NIH study that's called all of us it's looking I thought at the same thing looking at metabolon well they're not doing phenomics they're just doing genomics and um some digital health and electronic health records but it's the phenomics and most important it's returning the results to the people so they can optimize their health NIH is a big research project and I'm not knocking it I think it's going to be very valuable and it's wonderful and I see us as partners rather than competitors so we need a billion dollars from the next president to fund the human phenome project basically would that be good that would be that would get it started there is no question whatsoever a billion just to get started oh God okay yeah well but you know if if you say it will cost less than two uh B two bombers you know do you want to trade bombing in the Middle East for a new Health Care system that makes everybody well that that's the argument I've made to Congress and I think people will recognize that it isn't a great time two Wars polarization all of that kind of thing but but if you're stubborn and I am really stubborn I'm going to beating these drums until we we get this human phenome Pro initiative yeah so Le for for you you're 85 um right you you uh have been tracking this your whole life you've been developing this field you've done deep phenotyping on yourself I would assume through genomics metabolome microbiome and what have you learned in your deep phenotyping of yourself that that's been a surprise and what have you learned that's help you change your behavior or health practices that have improved the quality of your health in life well I think one thing I learn if you're comfortable talking about that I think it's important oh sure no I'm I'm totally comfortable one thing I'm an exercise fanatic and I think exercise has made an enormous difference in my health and I'm a big one who believes uh hyper oxygenation of the brain that comes from Dynamic exercise is really a healthy thing for your brain every day I mean the parts that succumb to alzheimer's are the parts that get least oxygenated so the more oxygen we can put in there the better off we are I would say the second thing is uh in in the course of aavil I lost about 25 pounds you know i' gradually like I was in good shape I weighed 195 lbs and now I weigh 170 and it's what I played uh college football at amazing okay and now I'm sure there's somewhat more fat than the muscle I had when I was in college but uh but I'll tell you losing weight makes an enormous difference in both people's perception of their self and how they feel so I I think that's really important but looking at my genome and learning I had one copy of the APO E4 Gene so I had to worry about Alzheimer's too and had a family history of that and and again there there are diet recommendations for that there are certainly exercise recommendations for that and certainly I check lots of supplements and metabolites and vitamins and keep my blood chemistries uh optimized to the extent they can be optimized story you told about bringing a person back from uh Alzheimer's to a functional individual is moving you know I I have friends that have done exactly the same for Alzheimer's patients in the South that are exposed to black mold and if you take them out of a black mold environment boom you can see remarkable changes immediately so there are environmental toxins as you pointed out that have enormous impact and we can get rid of them if you know actually one of the one of the treatments actually uh I use for the brain uh is for treating mold is intravenous phospholine it was so you mentioned that before as a compound that's really important in regulating your risk of Alzheimer's and actually it's a therapy for for mold yeah but were there any other analy that you found that you were surprised about you found the apoe gene I mean the exercise diet weight loss all makes sense but were there things in your in your phenome that were like oh my God I didn't know that and I I'm actually going to change what I'm doing based on that well I'll tell you the the biggest things I found that made a difference is uh on my initial blood test with ail I had a blazingly high uh Mercury level and it came from eating sushi tuna I stopped eating sushi tuna and that mercury level dropped right you know after six months or so back down down to normal and so forth so uh but for example you might see in your metabolites a low glutathione which is a compound that helps you get rid of Mercury right you would pick that up it wouldn't be on a normal blood test but you might find it when you did a deep phenotyping and then you'd know you need to eat these certain vegetables that upregulate Glu to fire or need to actually take that up regulates glutathione so there's supplements you could take there's dietary things you could take and so there's ways you can actually even enhance your practices to actually reduce your risk further yeah I think good functional medicine docs and people like yourself that have really learned these things are absolutely invaluable and I try and refer all of my close friends to those kind of Physicians because yeah really what they're asking for is how can I optim I my Wellness can I find a doctor that is in sync with me you know it was interesting that aril one of the limitations we had is we didn't have Physicians so it meant when we had pathologic conditions we had to give those to the patient and then say take this to the doctor and have him or her make the diagnosis and it turned out that about a third of the doctors really engaged and were wildly enthusiastic about this a third of the doctors were utterly indifferent and said I'm too busy don't bother me with these kind of things and a third were enormously defensive and I'll tell you those defensive Physicians really lost a lot of their erail patients because yeah we said go find someone who's going to work with you and not fight you yeah it's true because you know it's a lot of conf Confrontation if you go to a physician and you have all this data that one they don't understand that they've never learned about that they don't know what to do about it's a little bit intimidating and then you're kind of challenging their Authority and and and it's unfortunate because we should all be curious and we should all be going what does that mean and is that valid that was the third who responded they said yeah help me learn about these things and you know they were a pleasure to work with yeah that's pretty exciting um you know lastly I want to sort of dive into for a few minutes um the the computational tools that you've developed for these analysis of your genome and your phenome and how you kind of how it gets to decipher the complexity of the phenomics and then translate it into actionable things that each person can do to optimize their health and prevent disease because I think it's a little abstract I wonder you could help us understand a little bit more because while AI computers he it's like a lot but but you're kind of deep in the science of of this as a biologist you're also really deep into the sort of multiomic analysis through through uh computational biology well let let me just say that we have built a computational platform that one has the ability to store enormous amounts of data and to be able to move that data up to the cloud to analyze it effectively all the major analyses uh now and in the future are going to be done in the CL but the other thing this platform has done is you get the data in buckets there's a protein bucket and a metabolite bucket and a gut microbiome bucket and the genome bucket and we've developed a platform that has the ability to take various of the buckets and integrate the data together in such a way that it reveals biology and this essentially are a simple way to look at it is interesting statistical correlations that suggest there is a unique relationship and it's these relationships that lead to actionable possibilities and it's the integration then of all of these different types of data that really expand out the number of actionable possibilities yeah so when I look at the Gen phome you know there are seven different levels of actionable possibilities there when I look at the phenome you can do supplements and vitamins and and things in in the blood uh you can you can check your metabolites and your proteins you can and and so forth but where you really get the actionable possibilities is are when you start putting different types data together because what that exposes is relationships in your body that are significant okay it's almost as if the integration of the data Begins reassembling the complexity of your own body only it does it in a sense where you can do statistics find the correlations and then identify the actionable possibilities and we believe that with the human phenome initiative a million people that will will find easily 10,000 plus actionable possibilities that again will be available to all Physicians and to all patients and it'll be a part of making every physician an expert in all fields of medicine so it's it's really it it's going to be so transformational what we'll be able to do you know one of the really interesting questions is how Welly you want to be because you know you're the conductor of your own wellness and you handled your diet you handled your environment you handled your exercise your sleep all of these things are really important elements of wellness and and uh you know I think we have to learn to embrace these opportunities so as to enhance all the potential we really have because in the end as I said earlier Health potentiates every single good and unique thing about human beings that's true you know it's true what you're saying you know Benjamin Franklin said you know an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and and it's a lot easier to to prevent on the things if you catch them early and and this is what you're talking about is how do you define health how do you scientifically measure it how do you measure deviations from health and then what do you do about those things and that's something we really haven't done in medicine at all like I don't think I never took a course in medical school called the science of creating Health 101 I just it wasn't there I think pathopysiology and diseases and you know when you were talking it just reminded me of this case that I I mentioned earlier about dementia we did we didn't have the capacity to do you know metabolomics and proteomics and lots of other things but we did pretty deep phenotyping and we we did certain Snips as genes and we found for example that he had genes that impaired his ability to make glutathione which is important for getting getting rid of mercury we found he had genes that affected his risk of insulin resistance which he had which causes you know type three diabetes or Alzheimer's in the brain we found that he had genes for example that affected cholesterol metabolism a CP Gene that we also were able to treat we also found he had uh methylation problems which is genes that have to do with B vitamin regulation Mt far so he had combinations of all these genes and then he had the phenotype that went along with it right he had low gluty high Mercury high homocystine he had you lipid abnormalities at insul resistance and then we also looked at his got microbiome and found bacterial overgrowth and we treated all these different things like fixing the 36 holes in the roof and I didn't know what I was doing I just well I don't know let's just try this because I'm G I know how to get you healthier I don't know if it's going to affect your brain let's try and it did I done this over and over in functional medicine and and now with the Deep science we have with the capacity to measure our phenotype in such a a more profound way at such a lower cost when you 1985 to decide if you do the Human Genome Project it was a multi-billion dollar effort right that was the fear it was multi-billion dollar is going to take away money from other good scientists doing good work now you can get the your whole genome sequence for a few hundred bucks you know so even though now it's it seems still like a far reach I mean you know I I remember you know you know my first computer had I think uh I had had one megabyte of RAM and four megabytes of hard drive and it was $3,500 you know now I have a four terabyte little hard drive that's this big that I got for 100 bucks you know yeah so I think I think this is going to happen also with Diagnostics and testing the cost is going to come down the ease ease of doing it going to come in the ability to kind of integrate this and I think like you said in aifi institutions it's it's not it's not coming from there it's coming from people like you who stepped outside of traditional Institutions and built their own institutions and and and uh it reminds me of Bucky Fuller's quote that you know you don't have to try to change the system you just have to make a new one that's makes the old one Obsolete and I think that's really quickly what's happening really true AB really true so I just want to thank you for your work uh thank you for the dedication for being there uh every day and and uh taking this field forward over the last uh 50 plus years or more 60 years 65 years probably I don't know how long time as long as I've been alive for sure and uh and uh I think you know I hope I can keep working together and learning together think this is just one of the most exciting times in medicine Healthcare and uh it's such a privilege to be able to know you and to hear your vision and have people hear what you're talking about as really the future of everything we're going to be doing so thanks so much Dr hood for being on the podcast well in the end it's all about having fun right Mar that's right that's right and I think we both are having fun okay that's right exactly all right well thank you so much Lee this has been so fabulous if you love that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 18,053

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: UkY9d-rIywo

Length: 70min 33sec (4233 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2024