Why BRAIN INFLAMMATION May Be The Cause Of AutoImmune DISEASES! | Todd LePine & Mark Hyman

depression is not about serotonin yes you know serotonin is an important neurotransmitter but a large part of depression is actually related to neural inflammation [Music] [Applause] welcome to doctors pharmacy i'm dr mark hyman and that's farms with nf a place for conversations that matter if you care about your brain you better listen up because we're going to talk about the brain on fire today which is the cause of so many mood disorders neurodegenerative disorders like parkinson's and alzheimer's even things like autism and add and we're gonna learn about how the brain gets on fire why it gets on fire and what you can do about it from a functional medicine perspective because we are not succeeding with these conditions in traditional medicine very well and we're going to hear about why on this special episode of house call from the doctor's pharmacy with todd lepin again one of my great docs from the ultra wellness center been working together for gosh almost 30 years now and we see so much of this todd uh todd is a graduate from dartmouth he's an incredible physician he's a lecturer and teacher all over the world in the field of functional medicine and he is just one of the smartest dudes i know in this space so welcome todd well thanks mark i'm excited to be talking this afternoon okay so so we're going to talk about the brain and what's really been striking to me over the last few decades and we off you first heard this you know from dr promoter who's a neurologist which is that most brain diseases are diseases of brain inflammation but when the brain is inflamed it doesn't hurt like your joints or you know a sore throat it creates all these other cognitive problems whether it's depression anxiety autism add alzheimer's parkinson's these are all inflammatory diseases of the brain so talk about how we think about the brain and how traditional medicine thinks about the brain in terms of of how we approach the issue of inflammation well you can even go back to our training mark because you know when i can remember when we were learning about the brain it was all about learning about the neurons and the neural synapse and you know the neural synapse are the two nerves talk to each other and there's millions of them and it was all about uh understanding that and the neurotransmitters you know epinephrine and serotonin and dopamine uh but what we're learning more is that the brain actually is not so much about the neuron but it's about what i call the dark matter of the brain now in physics we know about dark matter most of the universe is actually dark matter we don't we can't really see it and it's not there and regular um conventional medicine uh can entirely misses the dark matter of the brain which is really related to the glial cells and this is really important a lot of people have probably never heard of glial cells uh allele cells actually come from the latin term meaning glue so it's the cells that hold the brain together only about 10 of the brain are composed of neurons and about 90 percent of the other cells in the brain are the glial cells and the very important part of the brain that's related to neural inflammation are what are called the microglial cells and a lot of doctors probably forgot about this they learned it in medical school and promptly forgot about it but the microglial cells are the immune system part of the brain and this is the part of the brain that gets activated under um exposure to a bacteria a fungi a virus or some type of pathogenic organism or some type of foreign molecule and when the brain gets activated via the microglial system that causes neural inflammation and neuroinflammation is incredibly important i mean a lot of the things that we see uh in our day-to-day practice you mentioned it depression depression is not about serotonin yes you know serotonin is an important neurotransmitter but a large part of depression is actually related to neural inflammation in fact yeah studies have shown that people who have people who have depression have a higher risk for dementia so it's not just about a serotonin deficiency and it's just like cholesterol is not you know that's not the the big thing about heart disease heart disease is about inflammation neural inflammation is about uh inflammation it's not just about these single molecules like cholesterol and serotonin so it's really important to look at the whole big picture and how that relates to conditions that we see all the time things like alzheimer's disease things like als things like multiple sclerosis things like even schizophrenia and actually i'll talk about some interesting vignettes about how schizophrenia is actually tied in with the neural inflammation in the immune system it's really quite fascinating stuff and and then there's the other thing i don't see children but pandas i'm sure you have probably cases of patients that had pandas which is the pediatric um autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders relate to strep infections and this can be a devastating um clinical uh scenario where all of a sudden this young uh boy or girl starts getting these uh strange neurological type behaviors these ticks these ocd type behaviors etc and these things are driven by neural inflammation the the original description was that it was due to a strep infection you know mothers and fathers know about that because when a kid gets a sore throat they take them to the doctor make sure they don't get a strep infection and typically we focused on strep being important because a strep infection can cause rheumatic heart disease a strep infection can cause glomerulonephritis that's why we're so on top of strep infections but what doctors are missing and even a lot of mainstream pediatricians are missing is that those strep infections not only can they cause molecular mimicry where the molecules where they're when they're attacking the strep uh bacteria what they'll do is those those antibodies will actually start attacking the brain and that's where we end up with these uh conditions like pandas yeah it's essentially remarkable the research on the brain the last decade and how it's revealed that all the conditions that we thought were maybe psychiatric or maybe more biological in the sense that they're disorders of brain immune function and and you mentioned the glial cells which is the brain's immune system that cleans things up but there's so many things that screw it up and including a lack of sleep which is a big one that's when it's really active but i i know i've seen in my practice that focusing on brain inflammation has led to the most miraculous cures for all sorts of floating curable conditions um and and and it's not often easy to find what the cause of the united patient of the day who had ticks since he was a little boy and it turned out he was really they came on after he had really bad series of strep infections and i think to my mind he hasn't even thought of having pandas but he might have an in sort of this low-grade inflammatory response from the strep that's been going on for 30 or 40 years but nobody picked it up so we see all this kind of stuff whether it's depression and depression you know depression we think oh that's a mood disorder well yeah it is a mood disorder and sometimes it's because you know you have a loss or some tragedy in your life and you see that's that are temporary but these sort of chronic mood disorders are often related to brain inflammation and they've even talked about using drugs for rheumatoid arthritis for depression to kind of shut off the inflammation of the brain i think that's a bad idea but you know what's what's causing all this brain inflammation that's leading to this sort of rampant epidemic of brain diseases uh you know i wrote a lot about this in the ultramine solution over a decade ago and it's only you know increased in terms of the the prevalence of these problems and the data linking inflammation and and actually uncovering some of the causes of inflammation that are driving this can can you talk about like what you know from a traditional perspective what we do is we give you medications we'll get antidepressants and we're not actually giving anti-inflammatories for alzheimer's although they tried giving people like advil and see what happens but it didn't work so what what what is like the approach we take to finding out what the causes are well that's where that's where you really have to take time and as you well know we do a deep dive in listening to the history and i think that's one of the things that probably distinguishes us when we do functional medicine is we have the time and we take the time to actually listen and listen to the patient's story and uh there's a there's a saying in medicine if you listen long enough the patient will tell you what the problem is but you have to allow the patient to talk and you have to be able to listen and piece together the puzzle so it's really about mapping out the timeline of when did their patient when did the patient's symptoms start how old were they what was happening around that time did they get a vaccination did they take an antibiotic were they bitten by a tick uh were they exposed to some kind of a toxin uh did they have uh dental work i mean there's all different kinds of things that that can trigger inflammation and that's where you really have to play medical detective and you know sometimes you're going to find it on the first time sometimes you're not it might take you you know a lot of uncovering you know lifting up stones leaving no stone unturned and that's where a functional medicine approach where you know we do a lot of uh advanced testing to look for you know um not necessarily an infection uh per se it's not like you have a fever and you're you're sick but what we would call a stealth infection uh where uh the you have a bacteria or a virus or an atypical bacteria present in the body that is causing this uh immune activation and in the process of the immune activation the brain gets inflamed and then can manifest as having a whole bunch of different types of uh neuropsychiatric uh conditions or or potentially even memory issues uh or motor conditions or other neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis so it's it's a real it's you know you have to play detective it's what it is it is i mean and the key things you know really drive the problems are the usual things we see that drive inflammation in general whether it's autoimmune disease or anything else you know it's toxins so it could be all the environmental toxins we see this in parkinson's with pesticides and chemicals we see evidence of heavy metals playing a role in many of these brain disorders that drives inflammation as well as toxicity we see the microbiome playing a huge role uh and i just recorded a podcast with emeryn mayer for the doctor's pharmacy and he's all about the gut immune connection and how it affects the brain and the gut brain connection uh and he's written a lot about the biology of this this is not some abstract idea it's something that's really becoming fleshed out in literature and that people are are coming to grips with as a as a as a force to be reckoned with in terms of the brain uh and and so we have to understand that microbiomes role toxins foods for example gluten can be very inflammatory for the brain for many many people because it produces both inflammatory antibodies that affect the immune system and autoimmune disease but also it can be a direct irritant in terms of the proteins that get digested and flame the brain and then of course there's there's infections that you were talking about like viruses or tick infections and so forth these all can be driving brain inflammation so in functional medicine what we do is we go wait a minute what is the story behind this person's particular illness as you said we go into a deep history and if we don't do that we will miss often the the real keys to figuring out the root cause of their problems and that's really what's so beautiful about functional medicines we have a set of tools and a set of of uh therapies that allow us to one identify the causes and two to actually treat them directly and it's pretty exciting because we do see a lot of changes from people's health absolutely and you were talking about you know the connection with the gut and there's really some fascinating stuff you know when when i was in uh training you know we we talked about parkinson's and parkinson's is the old old person's disease as you get as you get older you slow down and part of that slowing down is parkinson-like features but what we're finding out is that parkinson's is a spectrum illness and there is a big connection between patients who have parkinson's and gut disruptions leaky gut gut dysbiosis without actually both bacteria and yeast and there's a fascinating um uh uh literature on uh the uh the microbiome and the metabolites of the microbiome and there's a woman whose a husband has parkinson's and believe it or not she actually diagnosed his parkinson's by how he smelled which is to say that when you eat certain food the bacteria in the yeast actually do a metabolism of those uh foods and will produce these chemicals which are what we call the metabolism or the gut micro metabolome and um those metabolites uh in some people can affect the brain and uh so in in an essence you can sort of sniff out parkinson's um and she actually did that she actually could uh she sensed that there was some something going on with him and then had him examined and he was then diagnosed with parkinson's and in fact they're actually training dogs to sniff out parkinson's dogs can tell you if you're gonna have a seizure or if you or have a low blood sugar or if you have parkinson's or cancer it's pretty fascinating i i prescribe i prescribe dogs all the time this is one of my about my prescription pad absolutely yeah well it's interesting the body knows uh and i you know i think um maybe we can just sort of share as a way of illustrating the power of addressing inflammation on the brain with some cases i have a bunch of cases where autism and alzheimer's but we're good to get sort of a sense from your experience what are the what are the things that show up and how did you treat it and what happened well you know i i've had a whole a whole variety of cases in fact a couple of cases that we've had at the clinic where we had some patients who presented to psychiatric hospitals and uh when it came out you know you know when somebody has psychosis or a a breakdown if you will um they call that uh a you know a psychotic break or a manic break or whatever you want to call that and we've had a couple of recent cases where the patient's underlying trigger was uh lyme disease which is a spiral condition and always remember this is something that i really like to emphasize to my patients is that way back when doctors used to um treat syphilis we don't have a lot of syphilis uh in a private practice today it's just it's a condition which was readily treated and it's pretty much gone although there's still some recurrences of it but syphilis was caused by a spiral or is caused by a spirochetal bacteria and that's the same thing as lyme disease and lyme disease is the great mimicker and um it also uh can cause uh dementia and psychosis so that's one of the conditions that triggered neural inflammation and then also um there was a recent case um of bartonella also causing uh neuropsychiatric conditions and a a diagnosis of schizophrenia um so it's really a fascinating uh fascinating field and what the the problem is is that psychiatrists are not trained to think this way and neurologists are not trained to step over into psychiatry so they're like they're two different fields but they're really the same field so it's neuro cycle and neuropsychiatry this is an area that is actually really you know quite fascinating to me and i you know people always ask me you know what kind of doctor are you and i i i have my own my own uh uh uh uh description i don't answer that question yeah i'm a psychoneuro immunoendog and basically looking at the whole connection between the brain the gut the immune system and all of the the body when it's all sort of interconnected and it's it's really really fascinating and you can really help these people uh who are having uh significant uh uh conditions so what happened you saw this patient with schizophrenia right and and you you found the tick infections what what happened then were able to able to get their symptoms down by treating the underlying cause which is the underlying spirochetal infection i also had another patient who had a mycoplasma infection and it's actually known in the literature mycoplasma is an atypical bacteria and um it's another infection which can cause the brain to be on fire um so it's a it's a really a fascinating thing and the one of the tests that you can do that can uh check for this it's a it's not a common test i don't know if you've done this mark is the nmda receptor antibody testing um this is looking at the um uh parts of the brain that are stimulatory and this is something that any doctor who has a patient who has gone quote-unquote crazy or had a psychotic break they should have an nmda receptor antibody test because if you have this it tells you that there is some type of neural inflammation that's driving uh their their symptoms yeah it's quite incredible so i've had patients with schizophrenia before or bipolar disease and you know you think these problems are just so intractable and so difficult to treat and that can be um but you know in fact the whole field of functional medicine came out of the field of psychiatry with abraham hoffer's discovery that you could treat schizophrenia you know using nutrients and helping to improve the biochemistry of the brain and then linus pauling wrote his seminal paper ortho molecular psychiatry and science magazine in 1969 which talked about the perspective of how do you straighten molecules in other words how do you correct the imbalances or dysfunctions in your biochemistry it's called orthomolecular which means to straighten and that has really led to the whole field of functional medicine and we then sort of expand on that with our understanding of the role of inflammation in the brain and i and i you know many schizophrenic patients have high levels of for example gluten antibodies about 20 of schizophrenics have any gliding antibodies in their bloodstream when you take the gluten away they do better that causes brain inflammation when you do autopsy studies on people with alzheimer's or autism or schizophrenia or depression you find that their brains are inflamed so uh you know when you start to think about that it's like wait a minute we are treating this completely incorrectly and this is what was classical of traditional medicine you treat the symptoms not the cause and functional medicine is really about the cause and why not just what disease you have but why do you have it and in the case of these brain disorders it's often not obvious and the problem may be far away from the brain it might be in the gut or it might be in your diet or it might be a toxin or might be an infection and and or might be mold and it might be all sorts of things that we are kind of missing the boat on and so we have this potential to sort of rethink our whole approach to brain science that's what's so exciting when we see in the work of guys like dale bredesen or others and nutritional psychiatrists like those at harvard and metabolic psychiatrists at stanford they're doing work in this field understanding the connection between the brain and some of these systemic processes yeah absolutely and you know when you when you take a schizophrenic um and you look at them with a pet scan the positive emission tomography what you'll see is their brain lights up and that's because their microglia which is the immune cells in the brain are on literally on fire and unless you actually treat that the schizophrenic is at high risk for developing dementia down the road because their fire is not being put out and this mark is i'm going to mention this because i when i was i i actually did i've done some lectures for american academy of anti-aging medicine on neural information and in the process of preparing for that i came up against some really fascinating things one is that when you look at the genetics of schizophrenia um there's uh they did this whole genome-wide association studies of saying what gene or what genes are associated with schizophrenia and they did what's called a manhattan plot and on chromosome six um it it sort of stood out like a uh the you know the empire state building and what they found out is that on chromosome 6 chromosome 6 is highly involved with the immune system so that tells us that a lot of patients who have schizophrenia have an issue on chromosome 6 related to the immune system and what i'm going to tell you next is absolutely positively fascinating and this sort of blew me away um there are two case reports and remember case reports are just like a doctor observing okay this is interesting look what happened you know why did this happen and the two case reports were this um and this tells you you know how the immune system is intimately involved in schizophrenia one is a patient had refractory schizophrenia and developed some type of cancer and needed a bone marrow transplant the refractory patient with schizophrenia got a bone marrow transplant bone marrow transplant is basically giving you a new immune system after he got the bone marrow transplant guess what happened to his refractory schizophrenia it was gone what happened gone wow it completely cleared up because it changed his immune response to whatever it was responding to i don't know but his his refractory schizophrenia went away on the flip side there was another uh gentleman who also needed a bone marrow transplant he got his bone marrow from his brother who had schizophrenia guess what happened to him he caught he he got schizophrenic schizophrenia his kids are freaking wow i was blown away by that and i think that you know in it you know people who are doing i'm you know i'm a clinician i'm seeing patients but those those case reports are really really seminal to change how we think about how we see these conditions and the fact that that can happen hey everybody it's dr hyman thanks for tuning into the doctor's pharmacy i hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introducing all the experts that i know and i love and that i've learned so much from and i want to tell you about something else i'm doing which is called mark's picks it's my weekly newsletter and in it i share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health it's all the cool stuff that i use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health and i'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter i'll only send it to you once a week on fridays nothing else i promise and all you have to do is go to dr hyman.comforwardslashpix to sign up that's drhyman.com forward slash pics p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and i'll share with you my favorite stuff that i use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer now back to this week's episode i also found it fascinating that you know we talk about the gut microbiome and how that's so important related to the immune system is that when you do stool transplants you can literally uh transplant or infect a person and make them skinny or you can transplant stool and make them fat parkinson's right they're actually doing fecal transplants with autism and with parkinson's and seeing real changes in their brain function that blows my mind when you think about that it does it does blow my mind and and the thing about this is we are still in the nascent uh period of really understanding this because it's not like you know you take this one chemical or you take this one probiotic and everything's fixed it's a very very complex uh array and you know we have hundreds of different microbes and bacteria and viruses in the gut so it's going to take us a while to figure this all out but you know with i think we're also in a very good stage where you know we have um you know massive computing power we have artificial intelligence and i think that we're going to probably uh approach these areas of understanding neural inflammation and really difficult to treat conditions like als like schizophrenia like uh parkinson's and such and we're going to be able to bio-hack them in and alzheimer's right alzheimer's that's another thing though this is you're bringing up one of my one of my favorite things so for years mark what what did what did neurology focus on with alzheimer's it was what it was right and what would black if all you got to do is get rid of the amyloid and you get rid of par of alzheimer's that's right it didn't work out get rid of cholesterol and heart disease right so guess guess what uh uh uh the the plaque the beta amyloid plaque that was found in the brain guess what that actually is that's an antimicrobial peptide the brain is producing beta amyloid in response to some type of organism be it a virus a bacteria or a fungus so when we see that those are the footprints of a organism that the body is trying to uh attack yeah absolutely and i think you know we actually probably should have rudy tanzi on the podcast he's a scientist at harvard who specializes in alzheimer's and he has discovered the microbiome of the brain so literally there are yes viruses yeast bacteria in the brain which we thought was sterile that may be triggering this cascade of inflammation and then the question is where does this come from and it seems like a lot of it may come from the gut which is crazy how does it get from your gut to your brain but it does and it triggers this neural inflammation that's driving things like alzheimer's you know i think i think we often get stuck on one thing though right in in medicine we stick it stuck on it's this or it's that and i think the important thing people remember is whatever your diagnosis is it doesn't immediately tell you what the cause is so you could have 10 people with alzheimer's they could have 10 different causes and in one person you could have three or four or five different causes right and i just remember one patient i had who was seven years old it's really pretty significant um you know alzheimer's not not bedridden at this point but pretty non-functional also depression and was struggling really badly he was former ceo of his company a family-run business couldn't function anymore behavior was changing his kids grandkids family didn't want to hang out with him anymore because he was acting inappropriate and it turned out he had so many things going on i mean the biggest thing he had was high mercury which he lived in pittsburgh and had exposed to all the steel plants and they used coal ash for fertilizing land and they put it on the streets in the winter instead of sort of salt for the icy roads and he also had a mouth full of fillings and he also had a terrible history of irritable bowel for 30 years and was on stellazine which is just like any psychotic so it's like a relaxing for your gut which is terrible but he had terrible gut issues and bacterial overgrowth and leaky gut and gluten sensitivity and he also had in some resistance he had pre-diabetes so essentially he essentially had all these problems heavy metals microbiome issues and you had insulin resistance or pre-diabetes which we know drives inflammation the brain they're calling alzheimer's you know often type three diabetes and he had all these other biochemical issues genetically like methylation problems and which are the b vitamins that were also driving inflammation in his brain because he wasn't able to produce antioxidants and glutathione and when we started to address all these things we got the mercury out we fixed his gut we cleaned up his diet we got rid of the sugar and starch we optimized his b vitamins he literally came back from the dead like rip van winkle and was able to function go back to work be a functioning member of his family again this is someone who would have just been said okay you have alzheimer's and you are going to be a nursing home and that's the end of that uh and it was pretty miraculous to see that it sort of woke me up to how by really being diligent with these patients you can you can really help them either completely recover or dramatically recover and i've seen you know the spectrum from you know the tough cases of autism alzheimer's you know depends how much their they've got going on how far down the road they are but you see amazing stuff but things like depression bipolar disease you know mood disorders it's often remarkable how quickly the brain responds atd and and it's something that we just um you know unfortunately are not thinking about that well in traditional medicine and that's really why we do what we do with the ultra wellness center and we've treated you know like thousands and thousands of patients in this way and we now do stuff virtually too which is kind of fun so we can see people from all over and we have a great team of physicians and and nutritionists and practitioners who really help guide people through this this space because you know what kills me todd and i'm sure it kills you is you hear story after story and i'm sure you get this all the time hey could you help this one can you help that one or my mom or my dad or my sister my friend and and and people are just struggling to find answers and you know when you hear the story you go oh god i know what's wrong with this person but it's because we have a certain set of filters or lenses that we look at and it's so gratifying can you think of any other cases that you want to share that sort of illustrate this yeah i mean i i think i'd mention this this is a this is a fascinating case i i really can't um i can't uh 100 prove it but uh i talked about it when we talked about the uh the uh oral systemic health connection is the connection with the mouth and there's some really good evidence of uh the particular bacterium which is a bad actor and um it's called performance gingivalis and i have seen this in a number of patients who have had early alzheimer type symptoms you can also see this oral bacteria in patients with rheumatoid arthritis so looking for this uh with dna of the mouth organisms um and again you know this is a this is to me is a really fascinating thing you know somebody says well alzheimer's runs in our family well poor fermonas gingivalis may run in your family you may be spreading the bacteria from person to person and this this bacteria which is in found in saliva it stimulates the immune system as genetically susceptible individuals and can really lead to a profound uh neural inflammation and in one patient in particular who i i saw he had lewy body dementia which is another form of you know inflammation lewy bodies because they on uh uh anatomical examination the brain they find these little things they call them lewy bodies right it doesn't mean that they understand it it's just louis found it and that's because he named louis body after louis and and and that's actually what uh that i see is what um uh robin williams had robin williams had lewy body dementia with parkin you know so we call it we call it parkinson's we put in this neat little category and then we call it alzheimer's or we call it dimension we put in this little category and then we call it lewy body and there are also this interacting overlapping kinds of things and yeah they can have different clinical presentations but as you said there can be many many factors that go into uh into the the origin of this neuroinflammatory process um and diet plays a huge role you know if you don't have the right nutrients you don't have the right fatty acids um you you're more going to be more prone to all of your cellular membranes have omega-3 fatty acids if you're not able to make the compounds in the body which are called pro resolving mediators or spms um and actually have this as a supplement now um these are actually quite fascinating um compounds the spms are a selective pro resolving mediator compounds they're basically turbocharged fish oil and certain people some people can't take the their omega-3 fatty acids and turn them into these compounds and uh i clinically i have found them they either work really well or they don't work i don't know about you mark but um these are other um things that you can use as an as a nutraceutical to help turn off inflammation in someone who's got uh some chronic inflammation not to say if you take it it's going to help with alzheimer's per se but it's one of the other tools that we can use to modulate the inflammatory response in the body yeah so true you know we all fit in in traditional medicine don't know how to evaluate the brain properly because we're just looking at the brain but we have to look systemically and that's really what we do in functional medicine and you know dale bredesen coined the term a cognoscopy like a colonoscopy but for your brain and it's looking at all the things we've been talking about looking at diet looking at nutrient levels looking at hormones looking at toxins at the microbiome in the gut looking at infections looking at mold looking at allergens looking at the overall health of the person and seeing what of those things are driving adverse consequences for the brain and for brain function and in any individual they may the same cause might cause different things so one person it might cause schizophrenia another person might cause alzheimer's then the person might cause depression so we really have the tools to look at a true cognoscopy and then and then the question is how do we help the brain repair how do we set up the conditions for the brain repair so let's talk about how from a traditional functional medicine point of view we actually treat these people because it's a pretty systematic approach that addresses diet and lifestyle and also some of these underlying causes yeah i mean so we as you mentioned mark we do a lot of the testing so we'll do organic acid testing which is checking for uh the nutrient metabolites that are found in the body we'll also do gut microbiome testing looking at all of the different bacteria viruses yeast uh parasites potentially in the body uh we'll look at markers for leaky gut um the other test that will i do is a leaky brain you know just like you can have leaky gut you can have a leaky brain there's actually a test for that cyrex laboratories does the blood brain barrier test uh you can check also for neural autoimmune markers with the cyrex 7x test again you can do uh gut microbiome testing uh the one that i like to use is the gi map test because i think it's it's quantitative pcr so i i find it to be very helpful um the i think the whole gi realm area is an area that we're just learning and there's gonna i think as time goes on these tests are gonna get better and better but um i find that to be uh very very helpful to distinguish what's going on inside the person that i have um the other thing which i think is also really really critical mark uh is sleep and this is something that i really emphasize to people is that when our bodies sleep our brains take out the garbage okay and i'll guarantee you when you have a patient who's got a neurodegenerative condition one of the first things that you'll see is disruptions of their sleep and what happens is uh during the day you know our brain only comprises two percent of our body weight but it can it uses 20 percent of our body's energy which means that there's a lot of metabolic activity and what happens throughout the day is we get metabolic waste products that build up in the brain and our brain flushes them out during deep delta sleep if we don't get that deep sleep we can't flush the brain and take the garbage out in the brain and those toxins build up those things that metabolic byproducts fold misfolded proteins uh uh inflammatory molecules of amyloid etc build up in the brain and can uh affect uh how the uh the person's uh cognition is their memory their mood etc it's amazing yeah i think you know the diet is such a huge role too in the brain i mean we see that the the diet we're eating is a highly inflammatory diet in this country of processed foods inflammation um that are driven by sugar and starch uh excess refined oils uh all the lack of things that are anti-inflammatory the whole foods with all the phytochemicals in them and the nutrient-dense foods so we're eating a diet that's super inflammatory so this is the first thing often dairy and gluten are among the worst um and then and then we focus on how do we get the right nutrients because if you're low in certain nutrients whether it's the antioxidant nutrients or the b vitamins your body needs these nutrients to regulate your immune system to function whether it's zinc or vitamin a or selenium or vitamin d vitamin c all these are really necessary for proper regulation of the moon function so getting adequate levels of these is key also we really get people on an elimination diet if they're if we suspect or we test that they have sensitivity certain foods we treat the underlying infections if we find them with with directly with antibiotics if we need to or any virals or sometimes we'll use herbal therapies or things like ozone and other approaches to deal with infections we'll fix the gut often that's a big issue so we have a whole functional medicine approach to fixing that we've talked about a lot on this podcast and and then we'll address whatever toxins are there and help you eliminate the toxins through a really focused detoxification program and so building on on the framework of functional medicine we can identify in each individual which of these things are the problem and then we can start to map the right treatments for that person and it's so gratifying when you see this in people's life long depression gets better i mean there was a woman who was severely depressed who was in and out of psychiatric hospitals on lots of medications her marriage was falling apart she wasn't able to really work at work anymore he's about to get far from her job very overweight diet obviously high in sugar starch and processed foods and she did the daniel plan which is a you know faith-based wellness program but it's based on a whole foods anti-inflammatory pegan-ish diet essentially and she said at the six week reunion she's like dr hyman after three days of changing my diet my depression went away and i've been on piles of medications in and out of hospitals admitted for severe depression hospitals many times in my life and it's just gone and i'm like she goes is that possible i'm like yeah it's possible if whatever you're eating was triggering the inflammation in your brain you stopped it yes so it's really a sort of untapped reservoir of tools and tests and therapies that traditional medicine psychiatry neurology you're just not using and it's really where the money is well and you bring up a really good point mark because i you know i often uh ask my patients who are seeing a psychiatrist and i'm not going to bash psychiatrists but i think the profession of psychiatry is in the dark ages i can't remember the last time a psychiatrist that i've seen has done a blood test or examine the patient and i think that a lot of psychiatrists would actually do a good job if they actually uh took a side course in neurology to really understand how the brain is working so if you're a psychiatrist and you're seeing a patient and you are not utilizing a good nutritionist preferably a functional medicine nutritionist if you're not doing some uh some blood testing and you're not actually examining your patient you may be doing more harm than good um and it's not and the other the other my other pet peeve about uh the psychiatric world is that we are now medicating young children in ways that are unexplored we're doing polypharmacy uh in the young polypharmacy in the old with these neuropsyc drugs they're advertised on television and it is a complete if you will show excuse my french it is awful it's a it's a it's a terrible thing in this country and i i'll stand up here and i'll shout from the rooftops because this is a bad thing that we're doing to the brains of our people the brains of our young kids this is something that we should not be doing period no i mean it's true we really are you're relying on on downstream treatments so when the neurotransmitters go awry whether it's depression or autism or alzheimer's or add it you know we go well how do we fix the neurotransmitters and the question is in how do we fix the neurotransmitters the question is why are the neurotransmitters so screwed up in the first place and it's because of these phenomena one of the great examples i'll see is that the basic uh driver of inflammation is diet but there are other factors and anything that causes inflammation can interfere with our enzyme function in our and throughout our bodies and there's a key step in converting serotonin i mean tryptophan into 5-hydroxyl tryptophan into serotonin which is the happy mood chemical and when you get a high-level inflammation the body the the enzyme is sort of blocked and you end up with this byproduct called kinerate or can you narrate i'm from pronouncing it right i was reading it upset uh cyanurinic acid right yeah conurenic acid and and that level goes up and you can actually measure it in these patients and you see when they have high levels of these quinolinate or chaorinic acid it indicates inflammation and you know that the serotonin pathway is being screwed up and it's bypassing and producing these toxic molecules that cause inflammation in the brain and and so one by getting rid of the inflammation too by giving the helpers for these chemical reactions you can often really help improve the cognitive function of the brain but it's really about the inflammation and that's what's so so different and striking about it you know it's interesting you you say mark as i um i i used to lecture um uh for a metametric's laboratory who does the organic acid testing i'll never forget when i first learned about the quinolinic acid and that quinolinic acid is measured on organic acid testing and this compound was actually first isolated in patients who had aids dementia and what they found is that as you mentioned how that pathway gets switched over uh various uh things like viruses like the aids virus can actually upregulate the production of quinolytic quinolinic acid in high levels of quinolinic acid cause the brain to become inflamed they cause the brain to shrink and they can potentially cause alzheimer's or uh dementia type symptoms and that's where uh uh aids dementia was uh uh is basically how we found the importance of quinolinic acid and i'll bet you there's not many psychiatrists who are measuring quinolinic acid in their in their psych patients or even neurologists are doing that yeah we do at the ultra wellness center we definitely do and we see so much from that data that can help us figure out how to help these patients and that's that's really what's to me so so exciting well you know i also this is this is i'm gonna go back to when i went through my training because i went uh i trained at dartmouth and i went i had a great education at dartmouth medical school and uh one of my neurology professors was dr alex reeves and he was a fantastic teacher and wonderful open-minded energetic enthusiastic guy and he really helped me to understand how the brain works and also understand how it's connected to the mood and your whole being and i also had when i did my psychiatric training at dartmouth i had another mentor who was board certified both in psychiatry and neurology so that's where i really got and he was someone who would actually order tests on patients and understand that you know let's let's try to figure out what's going on this was you know way before functional medicine was uh was uh prominent and it got my um my uh my my own uh brain thinking about you know uh neuropsychiatry in and and it's a fascinating field is there's you can't split them neurology and psychiatry are one and when you when you think that they're that they're separate are you know you have this dichotomy you're not gonna you're not gonna help neurological patients and you're not gonna help the psych patients you need to think in neuropsychiatrically well i'm sure this happened to you like it happened to me but you know i started practicing functional medicine i wasn't focused on the brain i wasn't focused on you know treating people by dealing with the um you know the things that i i thought were focused on the brain i was really focused on fixing their health issues people came in with irritable bowel or they came in with asthma they came with an autoimmune disease or they came in with whatever they came in with and i would literally work on that problem um so fix their gut or fix their their whatever is going on and and incidentally their psychiatric problems would get better or their add would get better and they report dr hyman i'm not depressed anymore my panic attacks are gone my ocd is better uh and you know my memory is better right i was like what's going on here and so i began to go wait a minute and i didn't really come at this from an academic point of view i came at it from a clinical point of view and i started noticing if you pay attention to your patients you like listen to them they'll actually tell you what's going on i'm like well something's going on here and that's really what led me to write the book the ultra mind solution which is how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first and that book is a little updated now but honestly if i look back at it i think it's still way ahead of its time even now because it's talking about the ideas that were you know then were in the literature but just really beginning and stuff that i saw clinically like the role of for example tick infections the role of the gut microbiome i mean who's talking about the microbiome in the brain 15 years ago no he but we were paying attention to this and we saw these patients get better and i was like wow this is a whole new field so that's really why i wrote that book and i can't tell you how many people have said to me i got that book and it changed my life i followed the directions it's basically a step-by-step guide on how to fix your own brain and and sometimes you need help with a doctor and there's even sections in there and what to do if you need to go see a doctor and what tests you should ask for but it's really was striking to me and i remember this one patient came in after a while after i'd written the book about a year later and i said oh why are you here so well you know i'm pretty good i'm like what's going on well you know a while ago i had all these brain issues and depression and memory issues and blah blah blah and i'm like why are you here then if you're better now she says well i read your book and i followed all the directions and i got better i took nine months to get an appointment and i i i said maybe you can help me get even better i'm like okay so what was so beautiful about it was i literally took the science of what we do in functional medicine and applied it into practical steps for people to do and sometimes people need to dig deeper but i i think it's uh it's such a it's such a gratifying field that we're in todd because we get to see how people really can transform by fixing the root causes by looking at the underlying biology by treating the system not the symptoms by helping deal with this brain on fire through looking at all the factors that that can interfere with it so again everybody listening uh you've been listening to podcasts at doctor's pharmacy house call we've been talking about brain on fire neuro inflammation is linked to every known psychiatric and neurologic disease so if there's anything wrong with your brain you better look at the inflammation that's causing it and uh if you love this podcast please share with your friends and family on social media maybe they would benefit from hearing about the brain on fire leave a comment of how you've dealt with your brain i'd love to know more about your struggles and successes and subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy hey it's dr hyman if you enjoyed this video you're going to want to check out this next video coming up not only have a leaky gut but you can have a leaky brain look bacteria not to scare people bacteria love the brain why 25 percent of the body's glucose is used by the brain they're there they know where to eat they're going to you know le pen

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 221,338

Rating: 4.9434695 out of 5

Keywords: neuroinflammation, dr. todd lepine, the doctor's farmacy, functional medicine, brain inflammation, add, adhd, depression, the ultrawellness center, health podcast, nutrition, brain health

Id: xhxc8dVYBNI

Length: 47min 45sec (2865 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021