Cognitive decline, neurodegeneration, and head injuries: mitigation and prevention strategies, supplements, and more | Tommy Wood, M.D., Ph.D.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Dr. Tommy Wood. Tommy is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington. Tommy's research interests include determining how multiple types of brain injuries can impact brain health across lifespan, as well as developing easily accessible methods with which to track health performance and longevity in both professional athletes and the general population. Additionally, Tommy has acted as a performance consultant for professional athletes in a dozen different sports, and most recently worked with a number of Formula 1 drivers through his work with HINSA Performance, which is how Tommy and I met about five years ago.
He also serves as an Associate Editor of the Wiley Journal Lifestyle Medicine, is a founding trustee and director of the British Society for Lifestyle Medicine, and works with a number of digital health companies for charities that focus on how lifestyle and the environment can affect long-term health and chronic disease. In this episode, Tommy and I focus our conversation on the brain, although we do also pepper in a few conversations around F1, given Tommy's mutual interest with mine. First, we speak about age and age-related cognitive decline. We talk about what cognition and cognitive decline is, including a discussion in depth around memory, reaction time, executive function, memory retrieval, and more. We speak about the root causes of age-related decline and look at cognitive demand, including how we should think about distractions and multitasking. From there, we look at what skills are needed to avoid such a sharp age-related decline and the benefits of different types of brain stimulation. We then talk about different theories on the different types of pathology in dementia and neurodegeneration. Included in this, we speak about the lifestyle factors that can help prevent dementia and the importance of muscle. We also look at various supplements that can help with the prevention and survivability of dementia. We end this discussion talking about head injuries. We speak about what a concussion and a traumatic brain injury are and what the various symptoms are. And ultimately, what are the things that someone can do to minimize the severity of these? So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Tommy Wood.
Hey, Tommy, good to see you again. It's been, gosh, about six months since I last saw you at CODA, which of course we'll talk something about why you and I would run into each other at CODA, given our mutual interest in Formula 1 But there might be some people listening to this who aren't familiar with you or your work, though it's certainly been referenced and you've been on a number of podcasts. So why don't you give us a little bit of your background and we'll kind of go from there.

**Tommy Wood** (3:25)
Sure. I do have a varied experience and background, which I think is useful for the bunch of things that I do, but also sometimes slightly confusing because people will know me from one arena, but not know the work that I do elsewhere.
I'm an assistant professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington in Seattle. The majority of my work there is in basic animal preclinical research in brain injury. We look at ways to treat the injured, newborn and pediatric brain, and we also do some work in traumatic brain injury. But before I got to that point, I trained as a medical doctor in the UK. I worked as a doctor in central London for a couple of years before I did my PhD in physiology and neuroscience. So though I'm not a registered medical doctor currently, I don't have an active medical license. I do have medical training, and that sort of helps inform a lot of the work that I do.
Alongside that sort of formal training pathway, I spent a lot of time working with athletes. I was an athlete myself as a student. I spent some time coaching athletes, particularly rowers.