Hey, friend. Welcome back. Today's episode features Dr. Dale E. Bredison, a professor of neurology at the eastern laboratories for neurodegenerative disease research at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He was the founding president and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, as well as an adjunct professor at UCSF.

Dr. Bredison's laboratory focuses on identifying and understanding underlying mechanisms involved in the neurodegenerative process,

and the translation of this knowledge into effective treatments for Alzheimer's disease and other degenerative conditions.

In particular, he is especially notable for having developed, along with his colleagues, an approach to identifying and treating several subtypes of Alzheimer's disease,

which is the most common neurodegenerative disease and responsible for 60 to 80% of all cases of dementia.

He refers to his book, The End of Alzheimer's, as a guidebook for the 75 million Americans who carry the APOE4 gene to escape their fate.

APOE4, which maybe you've heard me talk about before, is a genetic risk factor that prior research has suggested

may increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease as much as between 2-3 fold and heterozygotes, people that carry 1 allele,

or up to 15 fold in those that have two copies of the allele known as homozygotes.

Sounds ominous, no doubt. But to know is better than not knowing, in my opinion, because it very well may give us the opportunity to control that fate.

That's especially true according to Dr. Bredison's research. In his book, Dr. Bredison paints a far more optimistic picture for those of us concerned about our cognitive future,

and he tells us to, quote, take a deep breath and realize that cognitive decline is, at least for most of us,

and especially early in its course, addressable. Despite what you may have been told, it's not hopeless or irreversible, to the contrary.

For the first time, hope in Alzheimer's have come together. He's not just talking about prevention either,

which he advocates when he likens his suite of baseline biomarkers that he suggests everyone get tested for at the age of 45.

Much like a colonoscopy, he calls this a cognoscopy. Instead, his clinical work indicates that his protocol can reverse the condition.

A feat that not only is impressive, but is utterly unheard of, and to my knowledge completely unprecedented.

This protocol, the cognoscopy to which he is referring, is known as the recode protocol, which stands for reversal of cognitive decline,

an approach applicable not to just patients with Alzheimer's disease, but also to those with mild cognitive impairment.

What makes me excited about this podcast and indeed Dr. Bretuson's work is the systematic approach he describes where a baseline is established,

and then the practitioner and the patient work together to iterate until they're in the right place,

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