Richard Isaacson, M.D.: Alzheimer's prevention

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of The Peter Attia Drive. This week, I have the privilege of interviewing a good friend, a collaborator, and an all-around interesting dude named Richard Isaacson.
Richard is a neurologist who specializes in Alzheimer's disease. He is the director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Cornell here in New York City.
His life has been touched by Alzheimer's disease, and from a very early age, as Richard describes, he felt a calling to go into neurology. It is clearly his life's work. He's an absolute expert in Alzheimer's disease, but specifically has chosen to focus his efforts on the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, as opposed to the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, and actually this puts him in the minority of neurologists. Professionally, as I said, he's an associate professor of neurology at Cornell Medical College here in the city. He's also an attending neurologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
He grew up not too far from here in Long Island, or thereabouts, and actually one of my favorite little tidbits I learned about him is he went to a high school called Conec High School, and he was recently named among the most distinguished alumni. So his photo now hangs alongside fellow recipients Rosie O'Donnell and Bob Costas. So that's pretty impressive. He's a little bit of a Doogie Howser. Started college at 17, finished medical school at 23 So as I think I point out in the podcast, he finished medical school before I actually started medical school. Did his internship in Miami before ultimately doing his training at Beth Israel and Harvard. Ultimately, he has wound his way back to New York. And as we get into great detail in this podcast about what his work is, and I think more importantly, how it can help people listening to this or their loved ones. And also I think we, I think are very open about the limitations in this space and what we do and don't know.
Richard has developed, and I should say Richard and his team, let's be honest, like all great people, they're sort of surrounded by a team of great people. They've developed something called ALZU, so that's www.alzu.org, which might be one of the single most important resources for people with Alzheimer's disease or early cognitive impairment and their family members. So we'll obviously link to that very prominently, but I think that's something that will, if you take nothing else from this podcast other than a sort of visit to alzu.org, that would be terrific. Richard and I get into a lot of stuff. I think this podcast probably runs about two and a half hours and we talk at the initial part, by the way, we get into something that was not at all planned, but when Richard came over, I don't think in all the time I've known Richard, which has been about three and a half or four years, I didn't notice how much he was into bling phones and when he whipped his phone out, I just couldn't stop laughing. So the first 10 minutes of this podcast are us talking about this ridiculous thing that I hope we have pictures of to link to in the show notes. Obviously, the show notes are usually time stamped, so you can skip past the patty cakes and get to the meat of the discussion should you want. But that said, I can't highly enough recommend listening to Richard talk about his slot machine addiction and his funny phones. We talk about the etiology of Alzheimer's to the best of our ability to understand it. We talk about the incidence prevalence and the distinction between those two.
We talk quite a bit about the distinction between men and women. As some of you may know, there seems to be a bias towards women getting Alzheimer's disease more commonly than men. Both Richard and I agree that that's probably not just an artifact of women living longer. There must be something else going on there and we explore that topic. We go into great detail about what we believe the state of the evidence is, which admittedly at this point is still relatively early, about what steps people can take to reduce their risk of Alzheimer's disease. We get really into the semantics of this. What is the difference between risk reduction and prevention? And we talk all about the politics of that and how those have changed.