THE CAUSES OF DEMENTIA, POINT BY POINT – PART 3

Welcome to the third and final part of our series.

After everything I wrote about stress in the previous section, as someone who has been involved in sports for almost 40 years, I would like to talk to you a little about good stress.

Demans, Alzheimer gibi tedavisi zor hastalıkların başımıza gelmesi nöroinflamasyonda bir artış yaşamamız, nöronal zarların ve iletişimin bozulması sonucu oluşur. Aşağıda, bu süreci tetikleyen unsurları ele almaya sizler için devam ediyorum.

8- SEDENTARY LIFESTYLE (paying off your sweat debt saves lives)

The eighth thing that harms your brain is a sedentary lifestyle or lack of exercise.

Changes in transportation habits, long hours spent at desks in the business world, and increasing digitalization in daily life have caused a slowdown in metabolic and physical systems. Sedentary lifestyles have spread rapidly. Desk workers, long-distance drivers, students, and people who work with digital screens are now in the highest risk group.

The problem with the stress I mentioned in my previous article, namely chronic stress, is that when it becomes chronic, it turns into ‘Distress’. Distress is an English term. You can understand it as a state of intense anxiety, sadness, suffering, grief, or being upset, disturbed, or worn down by other people.

Ancak Distress sizi yıkar çünkü asla dinmez. Daha önceki bölümde de önemle belirtmiştim: Stresin çok kısa süreli olması ve tam bir iyileşmeye izin vermesi gerekir.

Moving away from a sedentary lifestyle, getting active, engaging in sports activities is a constructive and necessary type of stress. It’s a challenge the body needs, but unlike chronic stress, it’s short, intense, and acute, and allows for complete recovery… So it’s like a shock to the body; a change of state, intense, but then we calm down and become very happy. This happiness is largely related to the chemical changes in our brain. Understanding the purpose of our brain is crucial here. The brain’s purpose is to process information, to process signals. Information comes into the brain, and this activates the brain. It processes the information and sends signals outwards.

And here’s a little-known fact: Movement provides ninety percent of the brain’s activity and stimulation, giving the brain a reason to do something. Ninety percent is related to movement, posture, and position in the field of gravity. You don’t just have to primarily practice fitness and other sports activities like I do; I’m talking about all kinds of movement here. Because every movement provides a signal. However, if we increase the intensity, if we make it really intense and short, then it becomes more of a challenge. Then the body responds to this challenge. And if it is given a chance to repair and recover, it develops better than before. It does this with a crucial protein called BDNF—Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor.

BDNF is actually a miracle nutrient for the brain. It’s even ideal for forming new synapses.

When you lack movement and exercise, your brain experiences a significant lack of regeneration. Brain tissue cannot repair itself as healthily as before. This, over time, leads to atrophy, or shrinkage, and an increased risk of dementia.

9- SMOKING AND ALCOHOL (deadly teamwork)

Now for the really interesting part! You probably know these things are bad for your brain, but you may not have heard these reasons, and that’s fascinating. Smoking and alcohol destroy your brain and increase your risk of dementia.

First, there’s nicotine. It’s not the smoke itself that damages your lungs – which is bad for other reasons – but nicotine causes chronic vasoconstriction, meaning the narrowing of blood vessels. This means that blood vessels narrow, and peripheral blood flow is particularly impaired. This vasoconstriction, combined with stress, leads to various physiological and psychological problems; it’s even the reason why many people have cold hands and feet because you restrict blood flow to the extremities. But another peripheral area far from the heart is your brain. If you’re a chronic smoker and have chronic vasoconstriction, you also chronically reduce blood flow to the brain. And here’s another topic that almost nobody talks about! Smoke, especially cigarette smoke, contains carbon monoxide, which you inhale.

Have you ever wondered how people die from carbon monoxide poisoning?

This is because carbon monoxide binds very strongly to hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is responsible for carrying oxygen for us. To carry oxygen, it binds and releases at very precise intervals. It holds tightly until it reaches where it’s needed, but releases at just the right time when oxygen levels in the tissue decrease slightly. However, carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin two hundred to two hundred and fifty times more tightly and essentially locks itself in place. Therefore, when you smoke, or breathe in the air of a heavily smoked area, even a very, very small amount of carbon monoxide sticks to that hemoglobin and never detaches again; it becomes trapped there. Our oxygen-carrying capacity is now reduced because some of the oxygen is being blocked by carbon monoxide.

And the brain is incredibly hungry for oxygen! The brain makes up only two percent of your body weight, but it alone consumes twenty to twenty-five percent of all your energy, calories, oxygen, and blood flow. So, it’s not very tolerant of a lack of oxygen and blood.

It takes no more than four seconds to lose consciousness if blood flow to the brain is completely cut off. In fact, the brain has developed this ingenious mechanism we call fainting. When insufficient blood flow from the heart to the brain causes your head to fall back to the same level as your heart, allowing blood to flow again. So, how important is this? Now, let’s look at the combined effect of carbon monoxide, which reduces oxygen per unit of blood, and the vasoconstriction that sends less blood…

If you’re a heavy drinker, the combined effect of these two things can mean you’re reducing your oxygen delivery by about a third. And that’s a really big deal! This means you’re constantly walking around with chronic hypoxia because, as I mentioned before, the brain needs energy and oxygen so much; it’s so dependent on it that its tolerance is very low, and it can’t tolerate too much reduction before it starts to suffer damage. And we must also realize that the brain is a very greedy master.

He’s incredibly selfish, really! But why? Because without the brain, nothing else can function. You can’t move, survive, act, or think. That’s why the brain always comes first. In fact, the brain willingly sacrifices parts of the body for its own benefit and survival. If there’s a chance of survival, it cuts off blood flow to everything else. Yet, out there are heavy smokers who willingly cut off a third of their own oxygen supply, thus creating chronic brain starvation.

Now, alcohol, as you know, is another important part of this situation. Alcohol is a direct neurotoxic substance for brain tissue, primarily targeting white matter, the brain’s insulating material. Large amounts of alcohol consumption can shrink the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain that is central to your humanity, reasoning, complex thinking skills, impulse control, and motivation. Impulse control is vital because white matter is made up of myelin, and the human brain isn’t fully myelinated until around the age of twenty-five. Therefore, even if young people are mentally developed, their impulse control can remain quite weak in some cases.

While the liver breaks down alcohol to remove it from the body, it rapidly depletes numerous critical B vitamins, primarily B-1 and B-12. These vitamins are essential for myelin synthesis. Therefore, alcohol first destroys myelin and then prevents its regeneration. This is both a nutritional and neurotoxic effect.

In other words, cigarettes and alcohol really do work together as a team. In fact, they complement each other because alcohol breaks down and destroys tissue, while smoking starves the brain and prevents its repair, since energy and blood flow are among the most critical and important components of repair.

10- SPENDING TIME IN FRONT OF SCREENS (synaptogenesis catastrophe – unknown dangers of blue light)

And the tenth point is spending too much time in front of screens, meaning too much time on your phone, tablet, and computer. And many people talk about this, but usually all you hear from them is: “Yes, you shouldn’t be exposed to too much blue light because it disrupts sleep.” And that’s exactly where their story ends. Okay, now we’re going to delve a little deeper, and you’ll really love this. This is definitely my favorite topic to talk about in my seminars.

We need to consider how the brain was designed; that is, what was its purpose?

In a time when we didn’t have all our modern conveniences and technologies, what kind of world did our brains function in?

Anlatmak istediğim ekran yapay bir odak noktasıdır. Geçmişte bu denli yoğun odaklandığımız ve vakit harcadığımız bir araç hiç olmamıştı. Çünkü beyin, üç boyutlu bir dünyada hareket etmek, sürekli hareket halinde olmak üzere tasarlanmıştır. Ve bu üç boyutlu ortamda derinlik, doku, nüanslar, gölgelendirme ve yerçekimi gibi unsurlar bulunur. Biz etrafta hareket ederken tüm bu verileri işler ve zihnimizde bir resim oluştururuz. Ve işte en önemli faktörlerden biri: Hareket ederken mekânsal navigasyon yaparız ve fiziksel hareketimizle eşleşen görsel girdiler alırız. Bu çok kilit bir nokta çünkü beyin öncelikle hareketleri işlemek için vardır. Çevremizde dolaşabilmek, yiyecek toplamak ve hayatta kalmak için bir beynimiz var.

Living things that don’t move don’t have brains. And then all those different parts of the brain that process these different types of information constantly work, calibrate, and restructure your brain based on the experiences you have. This brain restructuring process is called synaptogenesis. If you don’t use synapses actively enough, they will eventually lose their function and disappear. As you gain new and different experiences, you form new synapse connections, thus creating your own unique, up-to-date field of experience.

And pay attention to this. You can only achieve this restructuring with BDNF, as I explained in point 9. And BDNF is produced through movement and exercise. How amazing, right?

Scientific research has definitively established a measurable decrease in hippocampus volume in people who spend long periods of time in front of screens. We are losing so much integration that the brain begins to shrink.

Remember what we just talked about? What did we say?

This process, fundamental to brain development, learning, and memory, intensifies particularly during infancy and continues throughout life. It operates on a “use it or lose it” principle; active connections are strengthened, while unused ones are pruned. Synaptogenesis ceases.

In short, as you’re aware, spending time in front of a screen doesn’t require active participation in life. Therefore, the brain is highly stimulated without needing to do any constructive work. The result of this, and read this carefully, is ‘reduced complexity.’ Fewer circuits are involved, thus reducing neural load. The brain doesn’t have much work to do. Therefore, it simplifies and weakens. And as I always say, use it or lose it. These unused circuits will eventually wear out and atrophy. The brain will only retain what you use.

All of my clients, before experiencing such a significant change, would say, “Doctor, this is who I am.”

I’m here to tell you this: From a neurodevelopmental, neuroplasticity, and brain standpoint, ‘this is who I am’ is absolutely and completely wrong. That’s not how things work because who you are isn’t static. You’re not the same person you were last week. You are the person you’ve recreated since then. It’s all about the habits you keep repeating. Because you have the same habits, you keep recreating the same paths. And that’s why you remain who you are. But if you understand this, you know that by continuing to change one thing at a time, you can create small momentum in the direction you want, and then you can rebuild almost anything you want.

I wish you good health.