- [Dr. Patrick]: As you know, there's phase one and two clinical studies on Alzheimer's
disease where they were given 500 milligrams or 1,000 milligrams of resveratrol a day and
both of these studies found that there was a reduction in amyloid beta 42 in cerebral
spinal fluid.
There was an improvement in cognitive function and a couple of other parameters.
So it was kind of interesting because I recently had Dr. Dale Bredesen on the podcast and he
has this whole protocol where he's able to, with certain, you know, diet and lifestyle
factors, you know, improve cognitive function and also by MRI, like, have shown to, like,
reverse some of the atrophy in the hippocampus.
And so resveratrol was on his...
He's got this long list and I kind of like, everything in the kitchen sink where I was
like, "Geez, like, what is all..."
And resveratrol was on there.
I never really knew why until I, very recently, was reading a little bit of the clinical studies.
I thought that was super interesting as well.
And then the other thing that was interesting, as you know, was the autophagy because resveratrol
seems to be activating autophagy and I also interviewed Guido Kroemer on the podcast.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Oh, you did?
Okay.
- [Dr. Patrick]: And he talks about these three signals that are important for autophagy,
and one of them is the increase in protein...
Oh, wait, decrease in protein acetylation?
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Yeah.
- [Dr. Patrick]: Yeah.
Because sirtuins are histone deacetylases.
So that would lead to, right?
A decrease in protein acetylation.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: That's exactly right.
So that's how these Pac-Man enzymes are working.
And one of the enzymes that they work on is an autophagy protein that goes and destroys
bad protein.
So it's perfectly reasonable to think that if you take resveratrol, it might be clearing
the body of those proteins.
- [Dr. Patrick]: Yeah.
I have seen the study with resveratrol, so that's...
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Yeah, Richard Turner, I believe.
That's the study I think you're referring to and it looked really promising.
And he did what looked like a very convincing study, but he actually is still trying to
raise the money to do his larger trial.
And I'm trying to help him with that, but I would love to see that repeated in women
and more people.
- [Dr. Patrick]: Yeah.
I know that Dr. Kroemer has published a study looking at biomarkers of autophagy in humans
after they've been fasted.
And I think one of those was looking at, like, the acetylation on lysine or something.
So, it seemed to be working.
So it's all very interesting.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: The NAD boosters also help the brain.
So, at least in mice, a couple of labs have published now in top journals like "Cell"
that raising the NAD levels in the brain also improves memory and slows down the advancement
of Alzheimer's.
In mice, admittedly, I know we've cured Alzheimer's in mice [inaudible 00:51:23]...
- [Dr. Patrick]: Well, both nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide have been
shown to do that in animal studies, right?
- [Dr. Sinclair]: Yeah.
You've been...
Yeah, I'm amazed how much you know.
So that's true.
I would love to do a human study.
Actually, one of the benefits that we might see is also improved blood flow and that might
be helpful for vascular dementia because, as I'm sure you know, we've shown that NMN
and others have shown for NR that it also helps with blood flow and actually mimic exercise
and regrow the vascular system.
And we've done that for muscle.
We've got some early results that it also helped restore blood flow in the brain, which
is badly needed for a lot of elderly people.
- [Dr. Patrick]: Right.
Yeah, I know that's a big...
I mean, that's a big thing for cognitive function.
So NMN was able to do that.
- [Dr. Sinclair]: In mice, yeah.
- [Dr. Patrick]: In mice.