Why do healthy people still get Alzheimer’s disease? | Dr Darshan Shah

0:00Dr. Darshan Shah:Welcome to Live Well, Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10Dr. Darshan Shah:One of my grandmothers was incredibly healthy. She walked, she had a walking group, so she walked 10 miles every week. She grew her own food. She was Christian and she worked very much in the community. You know, she would always make sure that she was cognitively active. She was a teacher. so she would do all these things that you would say is healthy right she sadly got alzheimer's and she had it for 12 years um so she was diagnosed in her 70s and you know sadly passed in her 80s and i would and i would always say to my parents you should be doing this and you should be doing that and my mom's response was well your grandmother did all of it and got alzheimer's and i was like good point and then my other grandmother was the opposite it.

0:55Dr. Darshan Shah:She was a vegetarian, but apart from that, she smoked, she drunk, you know, she had a very like hectic lifestyle, the opposite of my other grandmother. And I'm like, wow, she lived till she was nearly a hundred.

1:08Sarah Ann Macklin:Wow. That's amazing. So explain that. Explain. Yeah. Okay. I'll give you two explanations. One explanation is about your healthy grandmother, right? That did everything right? There are hidden risks out there that people don't really consider. And specifically for Alzheimer's, there's a few that I think are really important to recognize. There's a lot of toxins in our environment right now, and she might have had some toxic exposure that could have led to her Alzheimer's disease, right? Now, the other thing is that even though people sometimes think they're eating healthy, you can still develop metabolic disease by the patterns of eating, And so it would be really interesting to know what was her hemoglobin A1c, for example.

1:55Sarah Ann Macklin:And lastly, there is a lot of variability in how people's hormones decrease as they go through life. And so there's quite a few hormones that we know of, like testosterone, estrogen. But there's also like growth hormone, IGF-1, for example. there's thyroid hormone and so sometimes aging decreases our hormones we know that right specifically sex hormones testosterone estrogen women fall off a cliff after perimenopause and they go through menopause so that could be a major effect for one grandmother right especially if she had children very early and she had maybe early menopause too the effects of this is compounding over more time.

2:49Dr. Darshan Shah:Because it's interesting because women get more Alzheimer's, well, not more Alzheimer's. Women are more predisposed to getting Alzheimer's than men.

2:55Sarah Ann Macklin:Yeah, and they do get more Alzheimer's. Yeah. There's many more women with Alzheimer's than men. Yeah. I think it's like a two to one ratio. And that must be connected

3:01Dr. Darshan Shah:to the menopause in some way.

3:02Sarah Ann Macklin:It's absolutely connected to estrogen. Yeah. And so the message there is, you know, if you're a woman, make sure if you're going through perimenopause or menopause, see a really, really good hormone doctor that can tell you like what you can do to kind of normalize your hormones.

3:16Dr. Darshan Shah:Right.

3:17Sarah Ann Macklin:Yeah. And then you have your other grandmother that was smoking and drank alcohol and everything and lived to 90. And some people have just genetic resilience, you know, really, really good resilience that they build up over time. And they are not genetically susceptible in anything. And in fact, they have genetic blessings that can help them detoxify a lot better than other people can as well. I, for one, don't want to play like genetic roulette, you know, and I want to give myself the best chances of, that I can, not just to live longer, it's just really to be healthy for a long time, you know?

3:53Sarah Ann Macklin:And so I think it's really important that, you know, don't look at the people that won the lottery as something that is true for everybody. Some people win the lottery, right? I don't care how many times you buy a lottery ticket sometimes, you might never win the lottery, right? And so we have to kind of stack the deck in our favor, you know, with our habits.

4:15Dr. Darshan Shah:thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode there's a link in the description