Louisa Nicola: Why Women Are at 6X the Alzheimer's Risk (And the Exercise Protocol That Fixes It) | #153

**Louisa Nicola** (0:00)
Alzheimer's disease is not a disease of your 80s, it's a disease of your 30s and 40s because it takes 20 to 30 years for this buildup to occur.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:08)
It's like osteoporosis, it's not a disease of old people, it is a disease of young people manifesting as an old person.

**Louisa Nicola** (0:16)
Up to 95% of all Alzheimer's disease cases, which is currently 60 million people worldwide, could have been prevented. If you are a woman and you have one copy of the APOE4 gene, it raises your risk by six times. Your insurance policy is exercise. Your brain will only survive if it does hard things. To preserve cognitive reserve, you must do hard things, you must shock it.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:43)
Is that why I get off my treadmill and I am smarter than I ever am? My brain is like on fire.

**Louisa Nicola** (0:50)
Your brain is like use it or lose it, and if you don't use it, it's like, well, I need to preserve energy, so I'm just going to kill off this area of the brain because I don't need it. Shut it down.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:59)
I believe you when you say this, you are going to cure Alzheimer's by the end of your career. I cannot say what I'm about to say about many people except Louisa Nicola. Not only have we become great friends, not only is she every week in the operating room with world-class neurosurgeons, which takes a lot of resilience on its own to be in the OR with people like me. But Louisa and I have been known on more than one occasion to eat giant steaks together. And recently, we've had the fun of being able to speak on the same stage. So that tells people that we're friends, that we're colleagues, but Louisa, of her own right, is an elite triathlete historically. She is a brain scientist. She is completing her PhD, and she is the designer and creator of something called Brain Code, with which, and I believe you when you say this, you are gonna cure Alzheimer's by the end of your career. So I'm so thrilled to have you today.

**Louisa Nicola** (2:15)
Oh, I'm so thrilled to be here. This is our second time around, and I'm just so excited. I love every moment with you on the stage, at a steakhouse, wherever we are.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:25)
It's fun though, right? I mean, who says scientists have to be boring? I mean, we're kind of fun.

**Louisa Nicola** (2:30)
We have so much fun.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:31)
We do have. So, you know, I sent you this old study that my group and I did so long ago, right before anyone besides weird scientists like us were talking about the role of exercise on brain health, because for millennia, decades, we think this is this black box of whatever is in here. But the reality is the brain is so intimately connected with our whole body. And that's what you talk about all the time. Like, why are you putting baby in a box up there? It's not only our thinking, but our control center. So what made you love the brain so much?

**Louisa Nicola** (3:15)
So, I became fascinated when I saw a brain, actually. I was around 22 years old and it was my undergraduate degree, I think around that age. Maybe I was a bit younger. And we had to go into a cadaver lab. And, you know, you're seeing all different parts of the body. And then when we got to the neuroscience section, I saw the brain and we had to double glove. And it was just so intricate. And I saw it. And the woman holding it said to me, this is responsible for everything that you are. And I said, really?
And I just, it was, something came over me. And I wanted to dedicate my life to it because I was an elite triathlete. And we were doing VO2 max tests back then. We were, you know, the old school way. We, I was training six hours or seven hours a day. And my coach never taught me about the brain or visualization or anything like that. So I started to understand it so I could be a better triathlete. And that just, yeah, that just opened, you know, the can of my future endeavors.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (4:17)
Do you think of the brain as, because there's a camp of people who think of the brain as the seed of our emotions, our mood, how we feel. Do you think of the brain as this physical, high surface area structure, uniquely folded, connected in a trillion ways? What is, well, how do you think of this?