Dr. Majid Fotuhi

But Alzheimer's disease itself has mild, moderate, severe.

And a border between MCI and early stage Alzheimer's disease is kind of gray area.

Recent studies have shown

that if you provide people who have mild cognitive impairment or early stages of alzheimer's disease and you provide them with a multi-disciplinary program that combines the five pillars of brain health that you reverse that amyloid build up in the brain remember i mentioned earlier that there are two bagger things when it comes to

brain shrinkage with aging that eventually results in Alzheimer's disease.

One bag is the plaques and tangles.

It's had these proteins that clump together and when they come together to cause inflammation and brain shrinkage and a whole bag of things that are due to lifestyle related factors, poor sleep, sleep apnea, too much stress, poor diet and all those things.

Now, usually people only look at the plaques and tangles as a marker of Alzheimer's disease, even though these other factors are equally, if not more important.

What's exciting and is thrilling is that

The multimodal lifestyle interventions have been shown to reduce the amount of flax and tangles in the brain.

The amyloid and tau levels drop with these lifestyle interventions.

One study was done here in California.

Dr. Ornish did the program where he provided a randomized controlled trial

in which one arm patients who had myocardial impairment or early stages of Alzheimer's disease received brain training, diet, socialization, exercise.

And the other group was told to wait, we're gonna provide this program for you in six months.

And then they monitored them and they had obtained levels of amyloid in the blood as a marker of how much amyloid in the brain at the beginning and at the end.

And guess what?

the amyloid levels dropped in these patients.

There are many other similar studies ongoing now to replicate this study.

There are also new drugs that have reduced amyloid levels in the brain.