Speaker 0:  we've been looking at dementia, entirely backward by treating it as a disease that only starts in old age, but groundbreaking new data shows that damage actually begins before you turn 10. if you or your parents were born between 1960 and 1985, a toxic environmental legacy might be quietly reprogramming your brain health right now. so childhood lead triples your alzheimer's risk, and a landmark 2026 nhanes study revealed that cumulative lead exposure stored in the human bone, not the blood, nearly triples the risk of developing alzheimer's disease later in life. researchers now realize that absorbed during childhood waits decades to leak back into the body as a skeleton ages. so this completely rewrites the timeline of the neurodegenerative diseases turning dementia from a late life medical issue into a lifelong environmental health crisis. what do you think about this, john?

Speaker 1:  this blow blew me away. so let's just kind of dive into, like, the life course model dementia and then what this is. so historically, dementia research, it focused on events occurring in middle age and later life. and so what they focused on were high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, smoking, cholesterol, and physical active inactivity. so, obviously, these are still critically important, but there's a growing body of research that now supports, and what you were saying, a life course model of dementia risk where exposures accumulate over decades and influence brain health. so what, one of the most important concepts that was discussed in modern dementia research is cognitive reserve. so cognitive reserve refers to the brain's ability to compensate for damage. so two individuals may have similar levels of alzheimer's pathology, such as amyloid plaques and tau tangles, but one may exhibit symptoms years later because their brain developed more robust neural networks earlier in life. so what was one of the strongest con contributors to cognitive reserve was education, crazy enough. so the 2024 lancet commission on dementia, they had identified that lower educational attainment as one of the most significant early life dementia risk factors. that's nuts. and so research are estimating that addressing education related risk factors alone could significantly reduce dementia, globally. this is crazy. what like, i gotta stop there and get your thoughts on this because, like, what education is of direct correlation to dementia? like, what's going on here? what are your thoughts on this?

Speaker 0:  yeah. i think that is interesting in a huge way, and i have so many questions, you know, because this is a lifelong thing. if, for example, if you go back to school at the age of 40 yeah. does that really reduce this or it only only education at a young age, while your brain is still growing, you know, until it's, like, 25 or whatever, till it's fully grown or your body muscle or structure, whatever that is. i'm really curious about what that means about educational level. like, if you continue to take courses through the rest of your life or continue to do whatever, does that continue to do it, or does it stop at a certain stage?

Speaker 1:  exactly. yeah. and yeah. where is the cutoff point? can you reverse it by by

Speaker 0:  continuous learning.

Speaker 1:  continuous learning? like like or can you reduce it by actually starting to learn at a certain point in life? like like, there's so many questions, but this is a great first start as far as, a whole new concept when it comes to dementia.

Speaker 0:  yeah. think of this update like a house built with a bad corroded copper pipes hidden deep inside the walls. for the first thirty or forty years, the water flows fine. everything looks perfect on the surface. but as the house gets older, the structure naturally begins to degrade and those pipes start leaking heavy toxins directly into the main water supply. you aren't getting poisoned by something you did today. you're dealing with toxic infrastructure that was built into the foundation decades ago. so as it starts to, use your bone marrow or your body starts to degrade, that toxins that are inside your bones start to get released. what concerns me most about all of this, and you went through a bunch of technical stuff, so i won't get into it, is that the peak of this was 1960 to 1985. okay. the peak of the lead, exposure. oh. the time. so the if you or your parents were born between 1960 and 1985, a toxic environment legacy might quietly be reporting on my brain now right now. so they're saying that that's the, the most impacted age group. so i sit back and say, well, i'm in there, and i am between 50 and 60 years old. so the question becomes, you know, this looks like we are going to see a massive spike in dementia over the next few years because we're just getting to the age of this group getting to that dementia time. that's what i mean by, like, that. what concerns me is, like, okay. we got a dementia problem right now, but we're coming into this period where it was the most toxic period, and we're gonna see a huge spike according to this. not sure what we can do about it, but, i'm just wanna watch it. so i guess this shifts how you manage your health. you know, shielding your brain now means aggressively managing your blood pressure, kidney health, and cardiovascular fitness to counter physical damage, from historical exposure. you gotta be taking, i guess, all the calcium and proper to make sure your bones don't degrade. it's a whole new set of treatments, i guess, to make sure you can stave off dementia for as long as you possibly can. the reason that patella, the kneecap, is used for this cutting edge research rather than blood samples is that has a biological half life of about thirty days in the human blood, but it locks into the bone matrix for up to thirty years. so the massive spike in lead exposure for target generation was driven heavily by the petroleum industry's historical mid century lobbying to keep tethritanol, lead, and gasoline as the anti knock agent despite knowing its neurotoxic profiles since the nineteen twenties. but not only that, but do we remember, when we used to get those really cool glass collectibles that were painted and they looked great for, i don't know, movies? that was all lead. mhmm. all that stuff, you know, so we went through a generation where they were using this for all sorts of things that, we didn't think about, plus, you know, these, aggressive lobbying to keep it active. so the ultimate limitation here is a diagnostic infrastructure. standard health care clinics lack the specialized x-ray, fluorescent, xrf instruments required to measure bone led safety, leaving patients unable to easily check their actual personal numbers. but don't panic. proactive, optimize you can optimize proactively, you can optimize your cardiovascular health and bone density through weight bearing exercise and diet because protecting your blood vessels and slowing down bone breakdown is a single best way to historically lock away, keep that lead locked away. so yeah. i guess now working out, doing weight lifting, helps dementia. so keep that kind of stuff up. right? yeah. so your childhood environment is still actively fighting for control of your cognitive future, making the environment, oh, clean up the ultimate form of modern medicine. for those in the chat who grew up in the sixties, seventies, or eighties, does knowing your childhood neighborhood, could dictate your late life health change, how you look at environmental policy today? let us know in the thoughts in the chat below.