The Hidden Link Between Your Arteries & Alzheimer’s risk | Dr. Daniel LaPerriere, MD Weighs In | #77

there's a lot of truth to that you know when When I think about things in functional medicine and we think about the body as this amazing multi-organ system that functions together, we need all of these parts synergistically working and everything affects one another.

Western medicine is amazing.

And we do great things with Western medicine.

And we've expanded lifespan.

And we can save people's lives in the ER and amazing surgeries.

But we have things siloed.

And so I was even thinking about when I was thinking about the vascular system, as I look back on what I would have thought about vascular system or vascular disease, even 15 years ago, it's like, that means I want to prevent heart attacks and strokes.

And, you know, that means lower cholesterol and exercise and eat well, whatever that sort of means to a given person.

I never really had great definitions of what that was, but that was sort of the role of thinking about vascular disease.

But the health of our blood vessels, our blood vessels, what they do is they carry oxygen and nutrients to all the tissues in our body.

And so if they aren't functioning as well as they can, then what's the biggest thing we can't live without is oxygen, right? So if our cells don't have oxygen, we can't make energy and our cells shut down.

And so getting that blood flow to our tissues and our brain, if we're talking about cognitive health, is extremely important.

And that can be affected by all our different organs, our lungs, our gut, So there's that interplay still.

But yeah, but I wanted to I figured today it would be great to talk a little bit about what is this vascular system mean and how can it affect our brain?

That would be great because, you know, thinking back to more traditional medicine, what what specialty has the word vascular? The only one I know is vascular surgery.

And I get it.

If you've got a blood vessel that's clogged up or has ruptured, sure, you want a surgeon to fix it, but that's on the more acute side.

And I'm really excited that you found it's not just acute surgery when there's a 99% blockage, that there are actually things that you can do to prevent surgery in the first place.

So what are some of the things that our viewers can do? Because guess what? One of the major causes, not the only one of the major causes of Alzheimer's is vascular, is not getting enough blood supply to the brain.

Right.

Like you mentioned, I'm trained by Dale Bredesen.

And in that sort of thought process, there's these different subtypes of contributors to dementia.

And one of them is vascular.

Right.

And even early on in my thinking about that, like when I first was sort of did some training eight years, seven, eight years ago, was it something like that with Dale? Was that vascular? I sort of just thought about blood flow, but, you know, I didn't didn't open it up more in my mind about all the different interplays here.