Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio, the podcast that brings you deep discussions about nutritional and health sciences.

And as always, I am your host, Danny Lennon. We're at episode 304 of the podcast today.

Now, when it comes to long-term health, thinking about health span and having a long and healthy life, there's probably not many issues that can rival the topic of neurodegenerative disease, prevention of loss of cognitive function, and some of the symptoms that arise from traumatic brain injury.

And it's a particularly scary topic. It's a particularly scary thing for anyone who has to face this

in themselves and people I know. And it's a particularly difficult challenge for medicine and preventative healthcare to try and tackle because of the complexity of this issue.

And so many research groups and many medical professionals have been really trying to look at what can we do from both a prevention standpoint as well as a treatment or at least

mitigation of symptoms standpoint for a gamut of different disorders within neurodegeneration

including acute traumatic brain injury all the way up to development of neurodegenerative diseases. And there are many

commonalities between them when we look at the metabolic injury cascade after traumatic brain

injury and also the pathophysiology that occurs with neurodegenerative diseases. And within anyone

that's trying to promote a healthful lifestyle for themselves and others around them

and us trying to get the pieces in order of what actually makes up long-term health,

there's nothing probably more profound than trying to keep hold of what we have with the mind.

And so how do we get to the core of preventing the onset or at least reducing risk

of the onset as much as possible of neurodegenergogenic diseases? And what can we do, particularly

in cases where maybe someone is facing a traumatic brain injury, which can occur from in all

stages of life, from neonatal, as we'll actually get into in today's

podcast, all the way to within sport environments and accidents, etc. So to talk through some of these

issues, today I'm going to be chatting with Dr. Tommy Wood, who is a research assistant professor

at the University of Washington in the pediatricist department, where his research focuses on ways to

increase the resilience of and treat injury of the developing brain.

And in fact, his PhD that he got in physiology and neuroscience from the University of Oslo was

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