hi ladies and gentlemen my name is pat lawrence and welcome to my show today we're going to talk about the aging brain in a healthy body and for my living in general we're living longer and in general they are researching all different things for diabetes is to make people live longer for hypertension  all sorts of physical things to live longer but well you left out and is the most important part of the whole picture is our brain  homework will go along with that so anyways we're going to be talking about the aging brain whereas we have a healthy body and my friend  expert on this and has gone into research on this and let's talk about it let's just talk about the illness to come on to the brain if we had modification lifestyle modification changes it wouldn't happen exactly so they issue is that we're as we age as we live longer two things are happening one is there is a higher chance to have a time span in which the brain can keep degenerating because things don't last forever so you start having problems like for instance our simers which is becoming a huge epidemic issue around the world and definitely here in the united states the other thing that is happening as we live longer one of the reasons why we live longer is because we have an easier life it's easier for us to get food we don't get sick it's easier for us to get around so we don't work so so associated with living longer and the modern life we have also seen an increase in chronic illnesses and those chronic illnesses actually have an impact in what happens to their brain too and they really affect the brain in terms of its function so they can sell or accelerate the aging process itself but they also pretty suppose you do having other brain diseases so it's really all linked together and so right now we cannot reverse aging yet and to a certain degree some of what happens in our bodies and our brains as wages determined by genes and we still can't influence that either even though we might get there one day with more research and everything that is happening in the field but there are a lot of things that we can do already to try to maintain what we have maybe even improve it and to prevent that we get sick or that we have and those those things are we going to really have to do with modifying your lifestyle the things that you do the today there we don't even think about and it's very interesting because patients sometimes come to the clinic wanting a pill to fix a problem and it's really not a pill that is going to fix their problem it's going to be that they start exercising or that they eat better or that they sleep more or that they become more socially active so those are the kinds of things that we can talk about if you want and that can really be done to try to prevent to maintain health and to try to prevent disease in the brain it's socially active part and very important  intrigues really yes ok when you say it's very important while we are social beings i mean human beings are meant to live in in a social group and it's part of being actually a primate and many other mammals actually have this feature and it's very interesting i come from a different country i come from spain as you can tell by my accent probably and after living in america for in north america for seventeen years the structure of society is very different here being an individual istic and having privacy is really valued in spain we are very you know see we're always in groups we touch people a lot for instance there's a lot of physical contact so it's actually very different being socially active is important because it really gives you a sense of being nurtured and that that actual feeling triggers the release of chemicals in the brain that stimulate function for instance when when a mother holds a child or when somebody touches you your brain releases something that is called oxytocin it's a hormone that makes you feel it really happy and that also has other biological effects on your body if you deprive yourself from social contact and you're not been touch and you don't interact with people those kinds of things are not happening social contact also lack of social contact also predispose you to things like for instance depression and when you're depressed the chemistry in your brain doesn't work the right way you're not creating the right there right kinds of things for instance your brain can produce factors that stimulate the growth and survival of your ne ons to maintain them over time when you're depressed that goes down when you're depressed your immune system doesn't work the right way so you're prone to other diseases so even though you might think that social interaction or being socially active is not important  actually years is tied to the biology of how the brain works and who we are as human beings but it's also part of being socially active is being intellectually active when you do things with others you're learning new things you're exploring new things you're stimulating have not done brain research in this field myself but i can transmit to you or really mean that there have been very interesting experiments done when people learn a new task something as you see as maybe juggling balls for instance you can actually see over time how the brain structure changes and how the part of the brain that is called the cortex that is the higher functioning area of our brain that actually gets bigger and bigger and if you stop doing something it gets smaller and it's shrinks  it's just like training your muscles or training your heart you have to train the brain and continue to use it to maintain the function or other ways you lose so everything ties together and social interaction brings in all those things  that and when she opened it you could see all the yellow inside which was probably the her knowing of the arteries are something that causes poor brain to die or the body to eye you probably are going to notice three things one is as you say that there are a lot of holes in the crevices it's just all very very kind of regular in the surface and if you cut it you see a gray ribbon and then everything else is just a yellow wide mass more or less so to speak so the gray ribbon is the neurons the cells that actually make your body or your brain work and they're doing all the functions their white yellowish part that you see microscopically those are actually the connections the neurons send out connections to each other they're called the accidents and that then drives i don't want to get too technical you have them so their connections from one neuron to oregon so there's been a lot of research and we now understand more and more how the brain works but still there is a long long long long way to go we just really starting really the twenty and of the twentieth century and the beginning of this twenty first century has become an age a new age for the brain or the brain age when a lot of research is happening and a lot of different disciplines are starting to collaborate together to bring us to a better understanding but i have get to see many interesting discoveries like saying it really is now let's go into the illnesses of the brain as the brain ages and we're keeping the body fairly healthy by whatever medication or different foods or whatever but yet our poor little three pound organ up here is still aging  stroke yes so the generation goes along with the aging process in any oregon so we may think that we are healthy and some of us or some people might be healthier than others as they age but really not none of us can escape the process of aging unfortunately have the ways we would live forever and i'm actually not entirely sure that would be a great thing but within the brain even if you're very healthy which some people can accomplish the aging process continues and that happens in any organization if you're a healthy eventually something's going to something's going to go wrong i think the most common  one of the main respecters is aging the other one is genes again we cannot really influence any of those two but there are others for alzheimer's there are other kinds of them mention for instance vascular dementia which happens when there are problems with the blood vessels supplying nutrients and blood flow to your brain and normally that process it's tied to what's happening in the blood vessels and your heart in the blood vessels in the restaurant on your heart the factors that affect that are exactly the same thing that give you a heart attack for instance which everybody is more much more aware so people who are obese people who have high cholesterol people who have diabetes high blood pressure who don't exercise those people have a higher chance to have heart attacks they also have a higher chance of having strokes which are not really related to aging but they are related to these other chronic prost problems they have a higher chance to having vascular dementia and actually we know now too that all those everybody who ages becomes demented even though as we live longer we're seeing that it really gets to a point when many people will be in fact for people who are over eighty five years old it's expected that about how are going to be demand are going to have a disease and so as we live longer we're going to get more and more people we're talking in the millions here that are going to have the measure so stroke maybe in part is related to aging but it actually happens in young people too and it has more to do with all these other poor lifestyle factors that i mentioned the same that can give you a heart attack for instance parkinson's is a degenerative process dementia is not as common it can also happening younger people when they have a genetic predisposition like michael j fox for instance but we still don't understand exactly what happens as we age white white why some people do get parkinson's but it's definitely a degenerative process and there are others but compared to a normal brain and i'll tell you it's frightening it's really scary the all time a brain looked like it was all scrunched up had lost of lot of it even stage when the patient can't do anything you can't feed him or herself and has a hard time as far as breathing and things like that  it's sad it's a very important that we bring alzheimer's for the forefront but there's so many other things to bring to the forefront it is true you have to take your pick or pick your battles but i have to say that it's definitely very important to pay attention to also amorous because even in developing countries not even not even united states but even the relevant countries people are living longer and longer so there's going to be more and more timers there about twenty five million people in the world right now who have alzheimer's about five million people in the u s because we're living longer it is suspected by twenty fifty there might be up to thirteen million people w this country i'm not even going to talk about the costs associated with it because i care more about the people than the money but it's a huge problem financially and more so socially first of all you have a huge population of people who who are suffering but think should should be in in the main spotlight so to speak because it's going to become a problem it's already becoming an epidemic and also because there are things that we can do to try to modify somehow the course to get there was to can cure alzheimer's but there are things that we can think about now when we're still young and healthy to try to prevent we get there well as i mentioned is lifestyle modifications none of them are a perfect thing i mean i cannot promise you that if you exercise and you eat well and you know you're healthy in other ways you will never get alzheimer's that's still not the case but certainly knowing that those things influence your risk or increase your risk of having you really don't want to have the numbers for that kind of lottery you don't want to be that that lottery winner so you really need to make sure that you exercise you stay physically active and if you want you want we can talk about the benefits of exercising for the brain you need to eat the right kinds of things and eliminate the things that can actually damage your brain and you neurons you need to make sure that you're not obese which really ties with the physical activity and the so many obese people in the united states in the united states right now almost forty percent of adults the u n convention that you went to yes the united states sorry the united nations high level meeting in september yeah i mean i want to hear about that one because that very important it is i mean it is very important but i learned when i went there that decisions are made in interesting ways and i still don't understand quite how that works so so the united nations is an international international organization in which essentially every country in the world has three percent taishan and they really determine how policies in many different areas go muslim is political defense economic etc only one more time in history before this meeting in  september they actually convene to discuss a health issue and that was ten years ago when we were completely overwhelmed by the hiv aids epidemic and nobody knew what was happening people were dying everywhere people were very scared and we didn't know what to do about it so the world leaders got together it really made a huge difference because it really set a path to follow in terms of recumbent patients and actions to really tackle the problem and it's really change people have hiv in now and they  live longer and we have treatments for them etc so this is the second time in history when the you know nations got together to talk about this uses recognizing that what we called non communicable diseases all these chronic diseases were talked about like diabetes hypertension obesity alcohol use actually tobacco that they have become a huge problem that is overwhelming us as much as hiv was overwhelming us before and that something needs to be done so they got together in september to talk about this but the thing that was very shocking to me is that there was no mention to brain disorders to brain disease or to brain problems and if you put things in perspective if you assign a burden them how much how much burd a group of the c c is is is representing within the world hiv it's five percent of the pie cancer is five percent of the pie cardiovascular heart heart disease is five percent of the pie and those are things that you hear about all the time  are very hot topics that are in everybody's mouth and everybody's you know pushing in terms of fundraising and doing things for but nobody talks about brain disorders brain these are thirteen percent of the pie more than double and it wasn't even meant it wasn't even mentioned and as i told us i've just talked about people are going to star suffering a lot from the mention from stroke and from all these other things nobody's really thinking about this and to me that's just an amazing and incredible thing in a bad way  to witness that it's not really in the spotlight on a global health agenda and their international agenda and so maybe here within our own communities we need to start thinking about it and doing something about it so that the people who are in charge of changing the course of history and changing international laws actually know that this is important to us and why it is important to be great to have this wonderful fundraiser you know with all kind of movie stars and everything like you know in honor of the brain that would be great but normally what happens is that it is really cool for a while and then people forget it i think if the boy if each of us really starts paying attention to how important it is to to take care of your brain and to live accordingly and practice what you preach and it becomes something raising grain in our in our cells in our society then we won't need to have fundraisers that are that are some really cool and hot for like a week and you know something else becomes more fashionable yeah do we have such a thing as a brain institute well there are many brain means to tubes many many brain institutes here in boston and everywhere else and each you know has a different kind of focus i mean there is research and in any kind of area that you can imagine which is really great and also instituted to provide clinical care for patients or healthy people who want to stay healthy so yes there are but the kind of work in the pen the lea in other ways within the united states the national institutes of mental health really is pulling together a lot of efforts around the country from researchers and clinical centers to try to to do to try to get to know more and to advance the field of neurology and and brain disorders and mental health but other than that things are pretty dispersed and there's now a lot of cross talk sometimes you think it'll all come together at some point in time i hope so it is hard to get people to talk and work together because  each institute and each person has their own agenda so it happens but it's really not easy i've kind of learned in the last year and i have that i've been trying to do this that it and you've been forging ahead you've been trying to bring you know attention to it i'm trying to bring attention to it i still have not succeeded but what we are getting i hope one day we'll get there it's not just me we will need many more people involved so that the dust that actually takes off well i can tell you one story about my my stepmother day so he would pick the lock of the also and every day he would go in there and every night always a lot of times patients would follow him out and they keep on going out into the street etc they were they were going for the so all up for it yes so they called me from the nursing home they said you have to do something about your father so i talked to him i went down there and talked to him didn't make a difference he was still going to see her he decided he'd fix a light bulb so he got up on the chair and he's growing in the light bulb well she didn't know who he was you know people come to that point you don't know who these people are they actually know who they are them so it was just tragic can you imagine that you get to the point that's wh we need to pay attention to these you know and to present anyways she she just got behind him and she pushed and he fell off the chair broke his hip went to the hospital and died from a higher attack and unfortunately that was a very sad way to go but it wasn't her fault she didn't do it i mean she did but she didn't mean to do it you don't know whether they don't know what they're doing and when we have  way of showing signs but in general yes they do they go through the same faces and have the same behavior how about one minute left ok and it's your turn to say whatever you want to the world  i'm just saying start taking care of your brain start paying attention to what you do and you don't do use it or lose it use it or lose it and most of the things that we can do for the brain right now have nothing to do with pil have they have to do with your lifestyle so be very conscious and if you're curious just ask there are a lot of us out there who are really happy to talk to people to educate you and to help you find the resources to make sure you stay as healthy as you can well that's great my my master's about four years ago and you know i'm no no young chicken so i only with keep your brain health and think about it