AMA #46: Optimizing brain health: Alzheimer's disease risk factors, APOE, prevention strategies, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to Ask Me Anything episode 46 I'm once again joined by my cohost, Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we have compiled a lot of recent questions that we've received around brain health. This has been in response to recent podcasts on brain health, Alzheimer's disease, neurodegeneration, and the recent series on Limitless, where I worked closely with Chris Hemsworth during a time when he learned that he had two copies of the ApoE4 gene. So needless to say, over the past, call it four or five months, we have been overrun by questions on all things that pertain to brain health. In today's AMA, we discuss the following, how Alzheimer's disease is diagnosed, what we need to know about it based on blood-based biomarkers, how these predict risk of disease, what the various ApoE genes mean in terms of a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, and why I believe it's important for everyone to know their ApoE gene, which is really code for, I believe we can do something about it regardless of the outcome. From there, the conversation shifts over into what someone can do to prevent Alzheimer's disease and neurodegeneration. Now, we do this in kind of two formats.
We spend a lot less time on the no regret move. So there are a handful of things that are really stone cold obvious, and there's really nothing to talk about, frankly. We can talk a little bit about the dose. So for example, we talk a little bit about exercise, but really only in the context of minimum effective dose.
The evidence is overwhelming that exercise is beneficial, so I don't really want to delve too much into that. Instead, what I want to focus on are things that are less obvious and really scrutinize the data in nutrition, supplementation, again, minimum effective dose of exercise, but not overall, lipid management, brain games, saunas, oral health, hearing loss, all of these things. I think this episode is kind of relevant to anyone who has a brain, if I'm just going to be blunt and kind of paraphrase Richard Isaacson, because anyone with a brain, regardless of their ApoE genotype or family history is at risk.
If you're a subscriber and you want to watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it on the show notes page. Again, I think that's valuable because we do go through a number of figures, which of course are also available on the show notes page.
If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of the video on our YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number.

**Nick Stenson** (3:01)
Peter, welcome to another AMA, how are you doing?

**Peter Attia** (3:03)
Good, this is gonna be a good one.

**Nick Stenson** (3:05)
It is gonna be a good one. Before we get to it, how are you faring out there in the cold weather and the icy climate of Austin, Texas?

**Peter Attia** (3:12)
I'm faring pretty well, but I can't say the same for the trees.

**Nick Stenson** (3:15)
Is school out today or are they back in?

**Peter Attia** (3:17)
No, it's been out for a week.

**Nick Stenson** (3:19)
Yeah, so for those listening, any chance they're gonna see any little guys running behind you today?

**Peter Attia** (3:25)
I would go with 50-50 on that.

**Nick Stenson** (3:27)
For those listening, the kids have been out for the past few days while Austin's been an ice storm, and every now and then on some Zoom calls, you see some extra special guests behind Peter. So we'll see if any make an appearance today.
But what we're gonna do today is something we're pretty excited about, which is really talk about something we haven't talked about in the AMA before. So we've had no shortage of podcast content on the brain, dementia, Alzheimer's, most recently with Kellyanne, Chris Hemsworth delved into it, and then you have podcasts with Richard Isaacson, Lauren Rogan, Hussein Yassin, Amanda Smith. So it's a topic that we've talked a lot about on the podcast, but recently we kind of did an analysis and we realized we haven't really covered it on the AMA. So what we did is we went, collected all the questions that have come through, organized them, and put together what we think is a really interesting AMA for anyone who kind of is worried about their brain, worried about Alzheimer's, neurodegeneration.