Brain & Spine (Neuroscience)

As I've gotten older, I realized I couldn't find words.
I got lost on the expressway one day, and I just felt it was time.
My mother, then on my father's side, my three aunts were all very bad with dementia.
There's just so much sadness because that's not your mother anymore.
That's not your father anymore.
It's not your aunt anymore.
It weighs on your mind that what's it gonna be in five years if I don't get treatment?
I made my own appointment with a neurologist.
The diagnosis was, mild cognitive decline.
Come back in a year.
That just didn't satisfy me.
I went to my regular physician.
He said, "I think I have somebody who may be able to help you," and it was Dr. Bardia.

The basic pathology with Alzheimer's disease is there's amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that are formed in the brain cells.
This medication takes the amyloid plaques from the brain away.
If they get into moderate and severe stages, the medications do not really work.

The first time I came for the infusion, the next day there was just a remarkable difference in me, i- just from that one infusion.
My other half noticed it also.
He says to me, "You're different today."
I, I am just thrilled and thankful to my regular physician for recommending me to Dr. Bardia.

Her initial complaint was she forgot her way to her friend's house, and now she's able to go back and drive back to her friend's house without any difficulty.
She's also having difficulty with speaking, but with this medication, she's able to verbalize the thought that she has.
So I think that this medication has helped her.
So words are coming out, meaning you're able to think-
Think and say.
Yes.
Before, it wasn't.
Correct.
When the words were hard to find-
Mm-hmm it was discouraging to talk to somebody.
That better?
That does appear better, yes.

The early dementia program is an interdisciplinary program that involves my field, neuropsychology, neurology, as well as pharmacology and the infusion center, and our job is to really make sure that our patients get the best treatment possible.
These are newer treatments from a clinical perspective, and what they do is they allow us to have better control of helping patients have better quality of life because they really do minimize the progression over time.
The older medications would kinda serve as a Band-Aid, so these are a lot better in the sense that we can have more control over disease progress.

I have told so many people about this, and they're like, "We never knew that there was even a treatment out there."
I am just so personally relieved that there is a program that most people are completely unaware of.
To know for me personally there could be a light at the end of the tunnel, and like I told my children, I said, "I know if I don't go for this treatment, I know what my future will be, and I don't want it."
To me, this has just been a blessing.
I don't mind telling people that yes, I was diagnosed with this.
I'm just glad that we're addressing it.

The way I best explain this to patients, is I tell people think of a big stove top.
It's like my best analogy.
A big stove top that has tons and tons of burners on it and at the top of that stove top is a smoke alarm and that smoke alarm is neuroinflammation, cognitive decline.
Each of those burners represent a cause, a source of inflammation that will make that smoke alarm go off.
So what we do is we look at each of those burners.
In particular, there are things like sleep optimization, gut health, fitness, and we look to see which is the highest flame and we try to reduce those.
And we do this through specialized testing to identify them and then we have an entire team here that works together, our nutritionists, our health coach, our exercise physiologists, physical therapists, the physicians, and we all work together to help the patient navigate through this.
Each of those flames actually are not just a flame by themselves but they actually contribute to other flames.
So if I have one flame that's up, it actually causes another flame to go up.
So it's not just, you know, medical evidence supports multiple modifiers happening at once.