Professor Tim Spector

for months or years...

And this is now developing this whole new theory of why people are depressed, which isn't the old theory of it's just due to a chemical imbalance.

It's actually your body responding abnormally to a normal response.

It thinks it's under attack.

Your brain thinks it's under attack.

It should then shut down and protect you.

This I find fascinating that we're now linking so much to the immune system.

And it's the immune basis of things of mental and brain diseases is becoming incredibly important.

I'm sure you've talked on the podcast a lot about inflammation aging and the role of controlling the immune system because if your immune system is out of control, your inflammation levels are high, your body can't repair itself, so aging happens faster in the brain.

All of these things are pointing to inflammation being crucial to everything,

in all aspects of brain health.

And when I went and looked, you can really find that the immune system has a role in every brain disease they've ever looked at.

And yet we've missed it because we've been so obsessed with, you know, the way that Prozac works by just being about serotonin or dopamine.

And...

For 40 years, we've been going down the wrong path and missing this holistic view that actually it's about inflammation paired with metabolism.

Because the other big player here is, and the reason a lot of people get dementia, is blood sugar is not well controlled and the energy supply to the brain is not well controlled.

So those two things for me have...

transformed my view of brain health.

And I used to study genetics, as you know, and it was always interesting that when we looked at twins, which were usually very similar for most things, when we looked at brain diseases, there was very little similarity in the twins.

So the genetic command was always quite small, apart from a few diseases.