I'll give another sort of medical one that I think is interesting, and I've been texting and interacting with Matt Walker a lot on this. Matt is a scientist. He wrote a book, Why We Sleep, and is about as credible as you can be within the world of sleep science.
He's the best, and he's a great human. Fantastic human.
He's a great guy. Great guy. He has the most pleasing duet tones with that British accent and kind lil in the voice. The plus 10 IQ accent, basically plus 10 or 20 IQ points with the accent. But his podcast is also excellent, and we can link to it in the show notes. But he did an episode on a class of sleep medication called DORAs, and DA stands for dual orexin receptor antagonists. And the reason that DORAs became very interesting to me is that I have Alzheimer's in my family, and it's left, right, and center for me right now because I have three relatives currently diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
Holy [__]. And these are APOE4 negative folks.
It includes APOE4 negative folks. So we won't get too far into the genetics, but people who should not be, based on that particular parameter, should not be particularly inclined to Alzheimer's, nonetheless have Alzheimer's. And then there are of course people who have 34. I don't think any of them are APOE33. I am APOE34. So compared to a 33, that at least as I understand it would predispose me say 2.5 times. You and my wife and Rhonda Patrick and Atia too actually is a 34.
All of you guys. I'm the only one that's not crazy. In effect, to our current understanding, you want to mitigate the accumulation of two things. One is beta-amyloid plaque, another is tangles that are created by tau proteins. And sleep is really imperative for this.
Mhm. And if you have sleep issues, as I have for decades, right, the onset insomnia, low percentage of deep sleep, etc., you're effectively unable to have your garbage service within the brain clear out these at a rate that offsets the accumulation. And by the way, we don't know if these are causal, right? There's never been any conclusion whether these are causal. They are most likely the protective effects of something else gone awry. Do you agree with that?
I would say that based on our best understanding, if you can mitigate the accumulation of these things, there seems to be at the very least a delaying of the progression of these diseases. And there are different drugs, infusions like donanemab and so on, that are kind of predicated on that understanding of the mechanism. This is still early days in the world of Alzheimer's.
Yeah. But it seems very defensible with our understanding currently that the less of this stuff you accumulate, the better off you are. Do you follow Dale Bredesen's work, by the way?
I don't. Let's come back to that. Let me just quickly tie this up and say that an example of a DORA would be Belsomra. There are a handful of others, but I have taken, as I believe you have... well, actually no, it was too strong for you. I gave you some... yeah, that's right.
You gave me the Belsomra.
I gave you a bunch of Belsomra, and you were going to give me some other [__] back, and you never gave me anything good.
Well, hold on. Hold on. That's still pending. But let me come back. So, you gave me the Belsomra, but I started using it. I was going to get it on a prescription. It's expensive as [__].
Yeah. I paid a [__] ton for it, and then I didn't use it.
Yeah. And I was like, 'All right, I'll take your Belsomra.' But the trazodone, I got off of trazodone and switched as a sleep medication to, in this case, Belsomra because it was literally down the street in an Uber at your house. Not recommending you use your friend's bootleg drugs, by the way. Talk to your doctor. But we also have physicians that are looking at all our [__], so it's not a big deal for us. I have been now on Belsomra for a few months as hopefully a... it's too strong to say it's a preventative strategy, but at least a delay strategy for potentially Alzheimer's and other associated neurodegenerative conditions. So I would encourage people, and I'll link to this in the show notes, to check out Matt Walker's podcast on this specifically. You know what they did with Belsomra, where they tapped the spines of people that took it, and they noticed there was less tau proteins in the spinal fluid.
