4 Surprising Things That Can Impact Dementia, From A Psychiatrist

With cognitive decline, it's important to focus on early intervention and doing what you can to prevent the onset—but that's not to say you can't do anything about it once symptoms arise. Just take it from functional medicine psychiatrist Kat Toups, M.D.: On this episode of the mindbodygreen podcast, she shares how she healed her own serious autoimmune disease and cognitive impairment. "Gradually, there came a day that my brain came back online," she recounts. "It was really exciting when I realized I could hold the seven digits of a phone number in my head and dial the number again." 

It was a three-year process, but since then she's learned how to help her patients heal much more quickly—in fact, she published a dementia study this past summer (along with neurologist Dale Bredesen, M.D., who we've also had on the show), in which 84% of patients with mild cognitive impairment got better after only nine months.

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Your mouth is the gateway to your body and the beginning of your gastrointestinal tract (and we likely don't have to remind you of the gut-brain connection). "[Your mouth] is right next to the brain," adds Toups. "And what's in the mouth and nose can travel right up into the brain so easily… It's quite easy for bacteria to track up there."

OK, this factor might not be so underrated, especially if you've been an avid mindbodygreen reader. Quality sleep is the foundation of well-being since poor shut-eye can affect everything from metabolism to mood to, yep, brain health. "Our brains detoxify and regenerate while we sleep, so we definitely need to take steps to protect our sleep and get enough sleep," notes Toups.

"Midlife hearing loss is a huge risk factor for dementia, and it is the biggest modifiable cause," says Toups. "I mean, it's easy to fix. You get a hearing aid." Research backs up the claim: A 2020 Lancet commission report lists hearing loss as one of the top risk factors for dementia3 but notes that using hearing aids appears to reduce the excess risk.

In Toups' practice, "We definitely see higher levels on average of things like mercury, lead, and cadmium, but we can detox these things quite easily," she says. Research has associated some of those metals (namely ​​lead and cadmium) with impaired cognitive function and cognitive decline4, especially as our world grows increasingly more toxic. However, as Toups notes, you can support your natural detoxification processes in the name of brain health.