The Silent Symptoms of Dementia: Watch Out for These 6 Warning Signs

today we're going to talk about the six early signs of um what was that um dementia now before i begin i want to tell you a little story about what happened when i was in practice and this relates to early signs of dementia that weren't really early signs of dementia you see when you're stressed or tired or maybe you didn't sleep you could have all of the symptoms of dementia but not really have dementia and the worst thing you could do is give your spouse or partner the wrong diagnosis or even diagnose them at all

that's really really bad and this relates to a couple that came in my office quite some years ago with early signs of dementia and as i was talking to husband i asked him when did you first notice signs of dementia he said i'm not sure but i think it was when my wife started to diagnose me and i was like oh okay and i noticed when they were sitting there they were going back and forth and the husband was having problems remembering certain things and his wife was constantly correcting him and telling him honey you

forgot again and uh you're mixing up your words and etc etc and so i was brutally honest and i actually just told her that's going to make things worse every time you remind someone that you made a mistake you're just going to lock it in and they're going to keep making the mistake over and over and over so i pulled the wife to the side and i i said i want you to do an experiment i want you to just let him make mistakes and just don't correct him at all for one week and when

they came back after a week it was quite amazing because he was articulate he was sharp he didn't seem to have any cognitive dysfunction at all so i just want to bring that up because when i cover these six signs it doesn't mean that you have dementia if you have these occasionally and if you know someone who has these symptoms just realize it could be sleep it could be their blood sugars it could be any number of things that is not real dementia all right that being said what is dimension it's a mental decline and

what's usually happening is certain parts of your brain are atrophying they're shrinking specifically a structure called the hippocampus which i'm going to talk about in a little bit but here are the early signs okay you have difficulty organizing and planning things you have personality changes okay there's a change in personality but again that can happen in for any number of reasons number three and this is interesting constipation now realize just because you have conservation does not mean you have dementia but it is one of the early signs simply because of the connection between the gut

and the brain your gut is like a second brain you have more nerve fibers in your digestive system than you do in your spinal column and a lot of cognitive problems actually can stem from your gut the microbiome in your gut all those bacteria make neurotransmitters in fact those little microbes make more serotonin than your brain makes serotonin and people that have alzheimer's or parkinson's have a much higher incidence of constipation than someone who doesn't have those issues then the next symptom would be sensory dysfunction that can include issues with smell taste hearing your eyesight

and it can also be your appetite all of these could be some of the early signs of a cognitive decline and as it declines more and more and more the ability to focus the ability to concentrate and your overall memory is what really shows up as being a problem all right number five language problems which i've already mentioned like you're trying to um find words for certain things you tend to repeat things over and over again or you might be mixing up your words this is a problem with the hippocampus and there's a lot more

to this topic that i'm not going to get into in this video but like there's one symptom for example that a person is able to talk and make sentences totally fine but it's incoherent what they're saying does not make sense and i'm sure that's extremely frustrating because the person is trying to get out this communication but it's coming out very randomly and all over the place this is mainly a problem with this hippocampus and the hippocampus is just shrinking i'm going to show you what to do if you have this problem or you know someone

who has this problem and the last sign of early dementia is the inability to navigate well in new places so let's say for example you're going into a new place you're trying to find a store and you just cannot for the life of you find this location this is because in our brain we have a gps that allows us to locate where we are in space and when this area goes down you lose your gps so your internal map is dysfunctional and you just cannot find out where you are so if you have a problem

with that that could be an early sign of dimension all right now i'm going to show you seven things that you need to do to correct this okay before it becomes more advanced the best time to correct this is right now in these early stages as compared to waiting before it becomes a real big problem and i think you can correct it if you get it early enough but the big problem in medicine is the lack of importance or significance that your diet makes in this area of your body they don't seem to connect the

dots between the great importance of what you eat and how that can affect your brain they're more like well this could be genetic could just be some stress things just happen and there's really nothing you can do about it your diet is key in preventing and even reversing dementia if you can get it early enough alright so the first thing to know is what would shrink your hippocampus okay a really common cause of a problem with hippocampus especially when in atrophies is a thymine deficiency that is a b1 deficiency and you can look this up

it's well known but usually that can happen from alcohol but it can also happen when you're on a high carb diet if you're consuming a lot of carbohydrates you are going to deplete vitamin b1 so the more sugar you eat the more carbohydrates you consume the more b1 your body needs the demand for thymine goes way up when you consume carbohydrates because you need vitamin b1 to metabolize carbohydrates and the more alcohol you drink the more b1 you need as well so number one start taking b1 and nutritional yeast is the best source of b1

and just make sure that you get the kind that's not fortified with synthetic vitamins i recommend going on the natural side because synthetic vitamins might work initially but they're not a good long-term solution now of course you also want to do things that will prevent a b1 deficiency and that would be not drinking alcohol anymore and also giving up some of these carbs but i have some good news you can consume vegetable carbohydrates right so that's exciting all right let's switch to number two and i've already kind of talked a little bit about this but

you want to fix the gut the microbiome there's some real interesting research on alzheimer's and parkinson's and there seems to always be a lack of diversity in the microbiome there always seems to be gut inflammation in these patients as well so one of the important things to do is to increase the diversity of the microbiome and one of the best ways to do that is to start consuming different types of vegetables not just one type of vegetable over and over and over like just salad but if you're going to do salad have a wide variety

of different types of salad different types of fibers that have different phytonutrients that can then strengthen different strands so that's one way another way is to do fasting fasting increases the diversity of your microbiome now you would think if you starved off the microbes they would get weaker but they get stronger and you have new strains that just kind of come out and start to thrive it's part of the survival mechanism that has been evolving for for eons now also realize that your gut and your brain is bidirectional okay through the vagus nerve you have

information going from the gut to the brain and information going from the brain down to the gut so if you have a problem with your brain you're gonna have a problem with your gut if your problem with your gut you can have a problem with your brain and like i said before a good amount of the neurotransmitters are produced by your microbes a good amount of the b vitamins are made by your own microbes and there's been some really good research on getting people off gluten and seeing huge improvements in dementia and so gluten can

actually worsen dementia and i'm not just talking about going on a gluten-free diet i'm talking about going in a low-carb no grain diet and one little point about gmo foods foods that have been exposed to glyphosate which is an herbicide which is connected to gmo foods are not good for your brain simply because glyphosate works by destroying microorganisms certain pathways in microbes like bacteria well guess what that can affect our microbes just like it affects the microbes in the soil so you do want to start consuming more organic foods non-gmo foods all right number three

and this is pretty powerful i found some great research on consuming more sprouts like broccoli sprouts that have sulforaphane now unique thing about sprouts is that they come from these little seeds okay and if you were to consume the seed it would be first of all not very available to you as far as the nutrition in it and so it's very difficult to digest but when it sprouts you have incredible amounts of nutrition that's released and so if you're consuming sprouts on a regular basis you're not only getting some of the peak nutrition that a

plant has but you're also getting certain phytonutrients that are not just anti-cancer like i've talked about in other videos they are super food for your brain so sulfurophane in broccoli sprouts is fantastic for any type of neurodegenerative disorders plus sprouts are really good for your gut and with alzheimer's patients and parkinson's the incidence of leaky gut is also very very high so include sprouts in your salad on a regular basis and they're very very cheap to to grow yourself all right number four and this is also very very important ketones ketones bypass the damage in

the brain and feed the neurons directly because think about what's happening in the hippocampus you're getting destruction of your brain cells so we need to restore that we need to feed the brain cells fuel so apparently at that stage it's not getting glucose fuel so if you feed it ketone fuel it can thrive and so if you have any stage of dementia at all you need to be doing regular intermittent fasting as well as periodic prolonged fasting and you're going to see huge benefits and for two reasons number one is that you're going to generate

a lot more ketones than you would even if you want a low carb diet and you're also going to up regulate all sorts of genetic factors that support your brain now i also recommend consuming like mct oil you can also do exogenous ketones you can buy these ketones as a supplement and so you just take like one tablespoon of mct oil maybe twice a day and that will help your brain a lot all right dinkle biloba has shown some significant benefits for dementia patients specifically the extract e g b 761 so apparently that extract gives

you some significant neural protection to your brain all right number six this is a good one lion's mane mushroom you know mushrooms are just fascinating the research done on lion's mane it's just off the charts as far as impacting your cognitive function i mean it's not insignificant it's it creates a huge impact on your brain so i'm going to put that information down below and then there's the usual recommendations that i always talk about in my videos on your brain that would be the omega-3 fatty acids specifically dha found in fatty fish and fish oil

and especially cod liver oil then you also have vitamin d which has a huge impact zinc very important exercise something else that's very important to increase oxygen to your brain and sleep if you're not sleeping you're going to jack up cortisol you're going to be more stressed and you're going to deplete the brain of oxygen now if you haven't seen my recent video on the brain you need to check this out i put it up right here