Peptides as a tool for Reversing Dementia

Matt Cook, M.D.

Hi, thanks. I’m delighted to be here, Heather.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So let’s jump into some of the things that you guys focus on really uniquely in terms of chronic infections, environmental toxins, and how, what your approach is to evaluating them, and then most importantly treating them.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Oh, that’s a good one. So, the interesting thing is stress from a variety of factors can be a significant trigger that can cause stress that can impact your immune system, and the, this is something that, you know, people like you and me were focusing on for a long time, and I think it was not deeply embraced by the Western medical community, but I think we’re really getting a lot more engagement sort of in this post-COVID moment when suddenly millions of people all over the world got a viral infection that created immune stress and a lot of people have physiological and neurological stress as a consequence of COVID. It turns out environmental, one of, the big elephant in the room environmentally is mold and mycotoxins, and then the other big player that has caused a lot of immune dysregulation and stress over the years has been Lyme disease and the vector-borne infections associated with that, and then like, COVID can cause long term immune stress, there’s some other viruses that can do the same thing like CMB and Epstein-Barr, and we think of the totality of those, and often it’s multiple combinations of those immune stresses that can cause inflammation to stress to the immune system, but also to the nervous system, and then the other thing from a toxin side is just to sort to think about metals.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right, right, and so how do all of these things impact cognition?

Matt Cook, M.D.

Well, so then that’s a good one. At a high level, one interesting way to think about it is that all of these things can begin to impact us at a cellular level, and so then for example, infections and toxins can cause stress at a cellular level that can cause mitochondrial stress, and so one thing is that our ability to functionally cycle energy through the cell and then into the mitochondria can be limited in the setting of viral infections, and that’s why one of the names for viral infections is chronic fatigue syndrome. So the, when, and so then if we’re not able to efficiently utilize energy in the body and then we have, then we’re not making enough energy, and so if at one expression of that could be not enough energy and not feeling enough of that get up and go. Another expression of that is if the cells in our brain are not able to make energy efficiently enough, then that could mean brain fog or difficulty concentration and difficulty thinking.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right, I think we’ve all had that experience, right, after maybe not having enough to eat or not having the right good foods or not having good sleep, that it’s hard to turn our brains on and come up with that word or remember how to get where we’re going or remember what was on that list that we made. So when you approach someone who comes into your clinic who’s describing brain fog or cognitive decline, what, like, how do you decide what to tackle first? ‘Cause it can start to feel overwhelming.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Yeah, so then, yeah, that’s a good one, and so then what I would, what I like to do is build a model of what I think is going on, and so in the setting of significant cognitive change, then we’re trying to gather historically from talking to people. Has there been exposure to a water damage building? Because I think mold is such an important player, typically we’re often having people check their houses and I’ve probably had 150, 200 people who we’ve seen over the years with a variety of problems who, you know, we, intuitively I thought, you know, this seems kind of like mold, and I said, is there any water damage in the building? They go, definitely, no, and then I go, okay, is there any chance it could be in your house? Definitely no, it’s a brand new house and this, or, you know, and then we have, time and time again, you know, somebody will call back in a month and go, you’re not gonna believe that there was a leak in my bedroom right behind my bed, and so then, you know, we’ll some environmental testing and thinking about the house and environmentally, just keeping that house crystal clean, I think, is super valuable. 

We try to gather a history of, have you ever been bit by a tick or have, has there been any exposure to, cat bites can be associated with Bartonella, but then we can, there’s a fairly robust amount of testing that you can do. So we do, we can look to see if you have been exposed based on looking to see if you’re making antibodies to any of those infections. We can do a test, it’s a T-cell assay that will begin to look and see, are your T-cells actually responding to any of those things that I actually mentioned? We’ll do some tests of the immune system and look to see, are there signs that the immune system is really in a lot of stress? , and so there are inflammatory mediators that we begin to look at and in doing so we, and then we’ll do genetic testing. So there’s, you know, some people that have some genetic susceptibility to cognitive change, and so then, you know, try to gather history and, you know, it’s a surprising, you know, you’ll occasionally you’ll find, oh, I’d suddenly, you know, nobody was talking about it and then suddenly, oh, guess what? They actually drink quite a bit of alcohol.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Right, right.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Kind of picking off all of those pieces and then trying to kind of work. It’s a little bit of a treasure hunt of trying to figure out what’s going on, and so then we try to do as much of a follow-up conversation and history and lab testing so that we can kind of build a model of what we’re dealing with.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So you’re a peptide and regeneration guy, and I wanna go deep into those things, but before we go there, I wanted to highlight a few things about what you guys do at BioReset that really stands out and that I don’t do at my office. So like, up until this point, you and I are totally on the same page. We’re doing a lot of the same testing, a lot of similar workup, a lot of similar questioning of our patients, and then you offer these unique procedures like ozone plasmapheresis, so ozone dialysis, plasmapheresis, and the stellate ganglia blocks. Those stood out to me a lot, and so I’d love for you to just take a minute and describe each of those and describe the type of cognitively declined patients that might really benefit.

Matt Cook, M.D.

So I’ll start with the plasmapheresis. That’s a good one, and then I’ll go through all of them. The, in your blood, your, it turns out it’s about half cells, so red blood cells, white blood cells, and those cells are either carrying oxygen or they’re the cells of your immune system that are floating around in your blood, and then the rest of your blood is proteins and plasma and, but it also carries a lot of toxins and so basically what happens is there are toxins that are in the blood and ultimately those are gonna get filtered through some of the filters in our body, the kidney and the liver, and then we get rid of them, but sometimes toxins can build up, and also sometimes patients that have an autoimmune condition will have a lot of antibodies because they’re trying to fight infections, and so they’re making antibodies, or sometimes people can have excessive antibodies, which is in many autoimmune conditions and those antibodies are also in the plasma.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

The cytokines?

Matt Cook, M.D.

So then, what, what’s that?

Heather Sandison, N.D.

And cytokines.

Matt Cook, M.D.

And cytokines, and so then, and so then there’s a host of inflammatory mediators in that plasma, and so then what we do is we put an IV in one arm and then an IV in the other arm, and then we run the blood out and then you can either run it through a plasma separator or through a centrifuge and we do both, and so then what that does is that separates plasma off, and then the cells come back in, and so basically it’s kind of like coming in for an oil change where we’re pulling off toxicity and then just giving you your cells back and in the process of that, that kind of clears the deck from an immune perspective because you’re taking a lot of, some of those excess antibodies off. You’re taking off some of those cytokines, you’re taking off often toxicity, toxins, probably if there’s mycotoxins in your plasma, you’re gonna be pulling some of those out, and it’s a probably a fairly significant reset to the immune system.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

So the, a few of my patients who have experienced this when, after getting plasmapheresis, often during the procedure itself, they notice that their head’s clearer, that they don’t have as much of the brain fog. If there was anxiety, often the anxiety is a little bit less. They can also feel a little fatigued, but they get a general sense that they are better, but there’s this sense of well-being that comes with getting some of that kind of, sloughing off some of the excess that’s in the plasma. So do you guys see the same thing?

Matt Cook, M.D.

Yeah, and then, and so then take, I’m glad you mentioned that, because that goes back to the question of brain fog, and then this is a, this is just like a great sort of trajectory of conversation for us because when you think of difficulty concentrating and brain fog, there’s a diversity of things that could be going on with that. So one thing maybe that the mitochondria are not working as well, so there’s not enough energy, and so then we’re not thinking as clear as possible. Another thing is if we have too much stress from an immune perspective in our blood, then the blood is too reactive, and so there’s antibodies that could be reacting to toxicity within the blood. For example, let’s say people have leaky gut and little bits of undigested food gets into the blood stream, and we start to have an antibody reaction to that. If there are a lot of immune reactions going onto the blood, the blood gets kind of thick. When the blood gets kind of thick, it has a hard time going through the capillaries, and so then as a result, then people will start to have difficulty thinking, because there’s just not as optimal of blood flow going through the small capillaries in the brain. 

Now, interestingly, the mitochondria piece is a total different piece than the lack of the blood flow and the viscosity and the thickness of the blood. People may be hearing about this because you hear of some people that will have clot, like clots in their brain, for example, after COVID, and that’s because they’re having an exaggerated version of what we call a hypercoagulable or an increased kind of clotting effect in their blood, but there’s mild versions of it. They can have brain fog, and so then when we pull antibodies off and we’re kind of detoxing and cleaning up that plasma, a lot of times then, blood flow to the brain gets better, and so then people will go, oh man, all of a sudden, I think really clearly and often they’ll think clearly for a while afterwards, and so then that’s partially diagnostic for us, but then that’s also now we’re, and we’re working at multiple levels, but then that’s an awesome way to begin to reset immune function, and then that helps us think about physiologically what’s actually happening, and in terms of what is the actual cause of that.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

There’s also a little heparin in that procedure, and so that helps with anticoagulation as well and getting all that blood flow moving. So the stellate ganglion block, you know, we’ve talked a lot in this summit about how related stress is to cognitive decline, how caregivers who are at high, high stress levels, they have a two and a half times the risk of developing dementia in their lifetimes. Also, people who have struggled with depression and anxiety are at higher rates of getting dementia. They kind of seem like flip sides of the same coin in terms of how the brain is working. So tell me a little bit about how you use the stellate ganglion block, particularly when it comes to mood.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Oh, okay. So then this is super interesting one. So it, basically what happens is we’ve got a little computer chip in our brain called the amygdala, and the, it’s the fight or flight control center, and then your, what you see, what you hear, all of your senses, your consciousness, and then all of your internal organs, all are mapping into that, and then as long as everything is amazing and everything is chill, then what happens is we run an everything is cool program, but then when stress starts to impact us, then we, and we get triggered into a situation where we realize, oh, this is fight or flight, and we may need to get outta here, then the amygdala turns on the fight or flight nervous system, and then it goes through these nerves that go through the front of the neck, and then they go to all of our organs to increase heart rate, increase blood pressure and turn off digestion, and then ultimately what it does is it drives putting epinephrine in our bloodstream, which when you’re young and healthy, it feels kind of awesome, ’cause if you get scared and you’re a little kid and you go into fight or flight, you get that epinephrine and you feel amazing, but if you’ve been having that for the last 20 years in a row and you get a little tired of that, all of a sudden what used to be fun when you’re a little kid turns like, into something that’s fairly anxiety provoking, and also it turns out that if you’re in fight or flight, then we were kind of intelligently designed this way that if we’re in fight or flight, then it kind of turns memory off because we’re reacting more instinctively, and there’s also an intelligent design because then sometimes we don’t really remember the terrible things that happened to us when we were in fight or flight, and I talk to people all the time. They’re like, you know what? I don’t even remember the two years at all, who were horribly traumatized in something, and the definition of PTSD is this, that we get stuck in this fight or flight state, and so then what we do is we, I use an ultrasound and then I go to where those nerves are, and then I use some numbing medicine that puts them asleep for about six hours, and then I also put the vagus nerve, which is right next to it.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Not the person to sleep for six hours.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Not the person, the nerves. I put the fight or flight nerves and the vagus nerve to sleep, and then I like to say that it’s kind of like you’re coming in for a fight, and then it’s kind of like, oh, hi Heather, how’s it going? And so then what happens is now instead of using that fight or flight nerve, it kind of forces you to go back into rest and relax and turn these other nerve pathways on. Another thing that it does is is that the fight or flight nerves vasoconstrict all of the blood vessels, and so when we do this, it relaxes the carotid artery, and so you get an increased blood flow, and so one of the side effects is that is you can get a little bit of a headache. Where is the first spot where all of that blood flow is going is to the deep brain structures and the limbic system, and so the, we use the stellate ganglion block kind of most commonly for PTSD and depression because we, there’s a fairly profound increase in blood flow to the limbic system and to the brain in general, and often that is enough of a reboot to kind of bring things back online, and then I have found that there’s a very high percentage of people that have cognitive change that have a lot of limbic stress because they’re struggling a little bit because it’s like the, their, they don’t have all of their, the capacities that they’ve had before, and so then helping to reset that and then get into a better mood can be profoundly helpful for these patients, and so then the interesting thing is is that before we do it, we do a lot of work. So we do a lot of IV therapy that is very helpful. So we’ll do phosphatidylcholine, which has lipids that are helpful for the brain, and so then we’re opening up the blood vessels and then we’re giving these lipid IVs, we’re giving vitamins, we’re doing mitochondrial support, and so then the products that we’re putting IV, we’re sort of driving to the brain and then we’ll do, the right side is kind of more PTSD related. The left side is often more clarity, intellectual thinking, and cognitive processing, and so sometimes, but then interestingly, a lot of times women will respond better to the left, and so, but we’ll most commonly often do both sides to kind of create a balance of resetting for blood flow, and if you think about the fact that we have this huge diversity of problems that can lead to cognitive change, and so then that, that could be genetic, that could be mitochondrial, that could be toxic, that could be infectious, and when I first started, you know, I was a little nervous to do something that I felt was like a bigger neurological intervention with some of the, for example, people with infections, and we’re now doing that for 100% of our patients with cognitive change, ’cause we notice they all do better.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Wow, and there’s probably multiple mechanisms, right? When the stress is lower, then our immune system functions better, right. There’s so many pieces of how these are complexly interwoven and that when we can get into a virtuous cycle, then you know, we don’t have to fix absolutely everything. We can kind of tip everything in that direction, and it starts to fix itself.

Matt Cook, M.D.

100%.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Sometimes. Well, hopefully 100% of the time.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Well, so then, you know, cognitive change I think is, as you know, is one of the most challenging ones to do and 100% that it’s a thoughtful trajectory and yet, you know, I think that as you know probably more than anyone, I think there are many simple problems that there are eight ideas and any one of those eight ideas will work, and I, you know, I really enjoyed meeting you and understanding what you do because I think you really have gone to the extent of understanding that it takes a totality of support around the cognitive change. You have to kind of manage all of these pieces, and so that, to really impact something that is so profoundly difficult, but the great piece is that if you can kind of build a mental model of all of the triggers that are causing it, then now we have these different tools that can begin to impact, and I think the mental, emotional, spiritual, and the depression and anxiety is a huge piece because when I talk to people, often they, I hear, oh yeah, you know, there was this one crazy stress, and that was this trigger that started us down this whole road and helping to redefine that and reframe and contextualize that has been, I think, a valuable aspect of our journey and helping people.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Wonderful, wonderful. So then, well, let’s talk about ozone real quick because I think that is also unique and especially the way that you do ozone. So take us through how you do it, when you do it.

Matt Cook, M.D.

So ozone is a medical procedure that would, was developed in Russia and Europe, and as a regulated procedure in many parts of the world and not in other parts of the world. The, there’s, I’ll run you through the, sort of the variety of types of ways that people would do it. It turns out ozone is an oxidative therapy, and so it oxidizes whatever it comes into contact with and can donate an electron, and so we can’t breathe it in because if we oxidized our alveoli, they’re very sensitive, and so they’re susceptible to that oxidation. However, it turns out blood has an enormous buffering capacity, and then when you put something that’s oxidizing in blood, it take, there’s a whole bunch of little batteries that are sort of oxidative, reductive molecules, and so that you can, if you take an ozone molecule and donate an electron to it, it will go from a low energy state back to a high energy state, and then when it’s in a high energy state, it can then donate an electron to some other process, and so the classic example of that is NaD, and so NaD is always converting from NaD+ into NaDH, and then it needs to get an electron donated to it to circulate back to NaD+, and so then one thing that happens with ozone is that it will donate that electron and recycle, and then that acts kind of like a battery within cells and helps to restore our cell membranes and do all kinds of things. The, and so then one strategy that was the traditional strategy has been done for 30 or 40 years, is that you can take some blood out of the body into a bag and then inject some ozone into that bag and then mix the blood with that ozone, and then the ozone will dissolve into the blood, and then it can go back in. 

So that’s a safe way to do ozone and has been done for a long time. That’s called major autohemotherapy. There’s some, a doctor named Dr. Lahodny came up with a concept called high dose ozone therapy, and so then what that is is there’s a machine, there’s two machines that will pull blood through a vacuum out of the body, mix it with ozone, and put it back in, and if you do that one time, it’s called one pass. If you do it 10 times, it’s called a 10 pass, and so that’s kind of helpful because people will hear about that as an idea. Nice thing about that is, it’s just one IV, pull blood out, goes back in. Then the next one is, is that you can put an IV in one arm and an IV in the other arm and pull blood out and then run it through a dialysis filter and then back into the body, and there’s a handful of different versions of this that are all fairly related to each other that people are doing all over the world in slightly different incarnations, but they’re all fairly similar to each other, and the thing that happens when you do that is is that when the blood goes through the dialysis filter, it acts as a very large surface area for the ozone to mix with the blood and then the blood’s going through a filter, and so what we have found is, is that there’s dramatically more surface area and more ozone that can be mixed. Because of that, we do a micro-dose of the ozone. So we do a concentration that is basically like, like about 15 times less than we do with a 10 pass, and people will have a better experience, less in terms of detox side effects, and then will find it to be fairly helpful, particularly for people who have infections, whether that be viral or bacterial, because the ozone can donate an electron. 

If it donates an electron to one-celled bacteria or to viruses, it can kill that virus, and so it’s a intriguing technique to use, and from that perspective and the, and then there’s also a version where you can do plasmapheresis and then do a micro-dose of ozone along with that, which gives some immune modulation and we find is an easier procedure to do than the full plasmapheresis, and people recover a little bit quicker and also feel a little bit better. The ozone, one of the side effects of ozone is that it will improve viscosity of blood. So that also when, whenever anybody does ozone, almost immediately mentally, they start to feel more clear. The it, the, by increasing NAD levels, ozone has an ability to help mitochondrial function, and so then that can help with sort of mental clarity and thinking, and then when I think of cognitive change, then what I’m thinking about is, oh, okay. Do I think that this is being driven by an infection, or do I think this is more genetic, or is there a little bit of a, is there a combination of two or three things going on? And then within the chronic infections, sometimes people may have had Lyme disease and they’re having an immune reaction to maybe some proteins of the Lyme disease that are hung around, but they may not have an active infection, and then other people may have a very active infection. 

So we’re sorting that out with testing, and then we will use a diversity of these approaches, but I think of ozone like an antibiotic, and so then with that as a tool that can help support immune function and help fight infections, then what we’ll do is we’ll use the ozone as sort of one tool, and if you think of people who are taking care of complex Lyme disease and infections, there’s sort of two camps out there. There would be one camp that says, if we could give three or four antibiotics, and this is particularly for like, neurological Lyme, they said we needed a model that would, we could use to think about neurological Lyme, and the model that they came up with was drug resistant TB, and so then in drug resistant TB, they often have to use three to four antibiotics to get enough penetration into the central nervous system. Now, the, that is a thoughtful and interesting, and probably a good way to think about neurological Lyme and one approach. The other group of people that probably are more in the second camp would say, well, what would be some alternate strategies that would have antimicrobial functioning, but that would not be an antibiotic? So ozone would be one, peptides could be, there could be a number of peptides that have some antimicrobial function. There could be herbal strategies that have some antimicrobial function. There could be other things, molecules like methylene blue that are antimicrobial, and so then what we will try to build, and then there are cellular therapies that can have an impact and effect there, and so then what we try to do is take a look, build a model, at times we’ll give antibiotics, but we’re generally focusing on strategies that reset, regulate, and modulate immune function, and then using these tools, depending on where they are from an infection perspective, and then we see how they respond.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah, very, a very comprehensive and nuanced and sophisticated approach versus like, all right, let’s go in and kill it and then hope it all, we win the war. So let’s segue into kind of this regeneration, and I don’t wanna put peptides fully in that camp, but there ’cause peptides do some of this support that can help us with fighting infections, with reducing inflammation, with getting toxins out. So the peptides are really this arsenal of signaling molecules that can help us tell ourselves kind of how to behave. So you are the peptide guy. You just hosted the peptide summit. Tell us what we need to know in terms of peptides for cognition.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Okay. So then, this is kind of like a theme for the conversation. So then if you go back to, we’ve got these different causes of cognitive stress, and so then with that in mind, then what I’ll do is kind of run through a variety of the causes and then some ways to think about it. So the first thing that I mentioned was the idea that there could be mitochondrial dysfunction and that mitochondrial dysfunction could be a challenge for thinking. So then it turns out that there are peptides that will stimulate your mitochondria, and so one is SS-31, one is humanin, and those are probably the two best. The next one would be MOTS-c. We, MOTS-c will also have some benefits in terms of glucose regulation and in terms of cognitive change, we do think that one definition of dementia is type three diabetes, you know? And so then if to the extent that we can begin to optimize mitochondrial function, but then also think about regulation of glucose and that’s gonna be interesting. So that would be sort of one category. Category two is, how much immune stress is there in this conversation? You know, it could be that it’s just a pure vascular problem, or it could be a pure toxin problem, but of when I see people, I almost always find when we do our testing, a component of immune stress, and so then there’s a whole category of peptides that regulate and balance immune functioning, and if we can, if you know, people have heard about COVID and, you know, you hear about a COVID, a cytokine storm. 

The long term consequence of immune stress is not really a cytokine storm anymore, but it’s kind of a smoldering kinda drizzle, and so then we will use peptides that regulate immune functioning, and so the regulation peptides for, that seem to work the best neurologically would be thymosin alpha one, which may or may not be super available in the States, but we have people all over the world that we’re talking to, and then there are a handful of fragments of thymosin beta four. There’s a fragment, the one to four fragment, it’s just four immuno acids, very anti-inflammatory, and a lot of neurological patients will benefit from that decrease in inflammation. The 17 to 23 fragment is also known as TB=500 and people have probably heard about that for a long time, and that one is a connective tissue and has, also has anti-inflammatory effects and has some immune regulating effects as well. On the immune side, if people have actual infections going on, there’s a peptide called LL-37 that is a fairly significantly powerful antibiotic and so then that can be very helpful if there’s an active thing going on, kind of from an infection perspective on that sense. 

The next category would be, let’s say there’s things that have an anti-inflammatory effect and, the, a classic one would be BPC-157. Interestingly, BPC-157 has an anti-inflammatory effect in the brain, as well as in the gut, and when you think about, you know, cognitive change, you have to think about the gut and there’s this gut-brain access, and a lot of times a little leaky gut that causes immune and antigenic stress can be a trigger for driving neurological dysfunction, and often the neurological dysfunction is a case of one plus one plus one is six, and so if we could begin to kind of work on that, and so we’ll often find that BPC-157 is, can be helpful at managing overall immune stress, but also by helping to heal the gut, and that one’s interesting because then you can take that one orally. Another one that would be interesting on kind of an anti-inflammatory perspective would be this, another one of these small peptides, kind of like the fragments of thymosin beta four, it’s called KPV, and KPV we’ll give to a lot of people orally if they have gastrointestinal leaky gut and inflammation. We give it to a lot of people with mast cell activation, and there, if you think about the mold spectrum, what happens is that there’s a protein called MSH that really is probably an anti-inflammatory protein that kind of regulates and manages a lot of aspects of neurological functioning that gets depleted in patients who have mycotoxins and KPV is just a segment of MSH. It tends to regulate mast cells and kind of calm them down, and it seems to have a fairly significant anti-inflammatory almost wherever you give that, and so people will give that IV, people will give that orally, people will give that subcutaneously, and as we’re walking through this journey of peptides that do stuff, that one, my experience has been that for the mold patients it’s particularly helpful, but it’s can be fairly helpful for a lot of people. 

Next would be, there are some peptides that are, that would people would classically think of as being the neurological peptides. One is called Semax, and one is called Selank. Semax will increase brain derived neurotrophic factor. Selank is kind of a GABA calming peptide. We like both of ’em. Some people will give them IV. Some people will give them subcutaneously, and I will have some people, interestingly, who will sleep a lot better when they take them, and so then that’s an intriguing category for neurological peptides. The, if you said, we’re gonna do peptides, and you can only do one category of peptides for neurological functioning, I would do this category of peptides that are called bioregulator peptides, and this is probably the most interesting area of peptides and directionally, I think, is gonna be an area that’s gonna be profoundly important to think about over the next 10 years, and that is that there are small peptides that regulate every organ, and so then there’s two that are from the pineal gland, Pinealon and Epitalon, and then there’s one for the cortex called cortagen, and these were developed and worked on by Dr. Khavinson, who’s a famous Russian doctor who I think is probably the godfather of peptide, sort of, thought and consciousness in the world and is an extremely high level person, and so then traditionally, what would happen is they would always combine the bioregulators for an organ with the, the blood vessel bioregulator, which is called Vesugen, and so then people are using micro-dosing of these peptides on sort of a regular basis, and the, interestingly, the pineal peptides will sometimes help to reset the circadian architecture, and so often people will sleep a little bit better.

You can, there’s low dosing and high dosing. If people are really not sleeping, I’ll go to high dosing and then transition to low dosing, sort of as a bolus to kind of get going. So I’ll do like go up to 10 milligrams and then come back down to one milligram. The, and then in parallel to the neurological bioregulators, then there’s three immune bioregulators, and so then if I’m, if we go back to that model of thinking about all of these causes, if there’s an immune component, I’ll think about adding in the immune bioregulator peptides on top of the bioregulators that are working on the actual brain, and so then that’s bioregulators, which are super interesting, and then there’s gonna be, like another one, there’s a peptide called GHK that seems to have some fairly interesting neurological effects, and you, most people hear about it as the copper peptide, and so then you, that’s the GHK copper, but GHK without the copper, you can give in higher dosing. So that’s gonna be interesting as a concept peptide-wise, and so that’s a little bit of an introduction of sort of thinking about peptides, and so then we will cycle people through that diversity-based sort of on testing, but it, you begin to realize, oh, so there’s a fairly robust amount of things to begin to do, and then to begin to think about vis a vis how to synergize with the other things such as ozone, and so for example, ozone will increase mitochondrial function. 

We use NAD to increase mitochondrial function, and so now ozone plus NAD plus mitochondrial peptide. So now we’ve got a stack of three things. The final thing that I just wanted to mention in, on top of all of those, there’s one other peptide called FGL that I think is, outside of bioregulators, if I had one peptide to give someone for a neurological and cognitive enhancement, it would be FGL, and that one’s gonna be an interesting one. It can be, it, and I’ve seen it to be fairly helpful for a lot of young people who have long COVID and profound neurological sort of consequences from that, and also with older people with cognitive change, and so then now we’re basically sort of building this model. We’ve got big IV things, we’ve got peptides, we’ve got supplements, and then sort of trying to curate and then support kind of an overarching strategy that kind of guides people through their journey, and interestingly then the stellate ganglion block pairs very well with those things, and then the final thing that we would think about and parallel to all of that stuff is kind of the regenerative medicine piece.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah, so let’s go there. So we get to this stage of the journey and people are feeling way better and now they wanna live to be 150 and how can we support them there? Stem cells and growth factors and hormone replacement, and what is, what does regeneration look like at BioReset?

Matt Cook, M.D.

Okay, so then you mentioned hormone replacement. The other, just since you mentioned that, what I’ll tell you is that one thing is that when we age, hormones can go off of a cliff, and so then there’s a thought of supporting hormones up as we, and as a way to kind of some more support and optimal biochemical milieu because those hormones are doing something, and so if they fall off a cliff and we support you up, then we think that that will support an anti-aging process, and also just help you main kind of your biomechanical structure and stuff like that. Another hormone that kind of falls off a cliff is growth hormone, and so then just for completeness, now I will have kind of covered a fair swath of peptides because there’s some peptides that can tell your brain to secrete growth hormone, and I think that that will be another helpful thing to think about for patients with neurocognitive and neurodegenerative issues that sometimes people with significant Lyme and mold and inflammatory neurological conditions can have some side effects in terms of headaches and symptoms with the growth hormone peptides, and so then I’m glad I mentioned it last so that we, so we just know that, and typically what I try to do is I try to do all those other peptides first, and then if I do the growth hormone peptides, I’ll start super low for these fragile patients, whereas if you came in and you were like, hey, I’m running a lot and I just wanna be in better shape. I might start you on it right away. So, the hormone replacement conversation, I think is a super interesting one and a good one, and then we have a diversity of ways that we can do that, and for people that don’t wanna do hormone replacement, there’s like, peptides that will help support testosterone like kisspeptin. 

So then you say, what about stem cells and growth factors and stuff like that? The, potentially one of the most intriguing things about stem cells, and we’ve been doing this for years because we have clinics in Mexico where we take people to for stem cells and at BioReset international, and the patients who have had the most long term success have been patients with autoimmune conditions, and often there’s an autoimmune component to neurological conditions, but stem cells tend to regulate immune function, and so then we were talking about all of those peptides that regulate immune function, and so now a stem cell is gonna do the same thing, but the stem cell is actually a cell that’s floating around this that’s regulating that immune function, and so then if the immune system is really stressed, then stem cells might be one strategy to regulate that, but then the, and five years ago, that was kinda like all we had, you know? Then what, but now all of this tech is coming on board, and so now we’ve got all of these peptides that can regulate immune function, and then it turns out the other kind of significant player in the regenerative medicine space is something called exosomes. Exosomes are stem cell secretions, and the stem cell secretions are the things that actually regulate the immune function, and so then exosomes are another strategy for regulating that immune function. Now, the both exosomes and stem cells tend to have fairly significant anti-inflammatory effects as well, and so then we know that the inflammation that is in blood vessels in the blood or in tissues can be a driver of dysfunction and particularly in neurological dysfunction, and so then these can be strategies to use to manage inflammation, and then not just neurologically, but all over the body.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah, we’ve seen some incredible benefits for residents at Marama who have had the benefit of getting stem cells and just seeing them sort of like perk back up, and we had one resident over there who was on hospice. She had a pressure wound, and she, everyone was sort of preparing for the worst and they decided to do stem cells, and it was just of this completely miraculous turnaround, really amazing. So helpful, I think with wound healing as well with, with so many things, because we’re getting the signals for growth and recovery and regeneration from that.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Right, and so then now the, and as an idea, you think, oh, okay, so let’s say something happens over here, like, an infection, and so then the body goes, oh my God, that was crazy, and so it created a cytokine storm, and so that storm starts to wind up, but then what happens is, is that’s a signal then for your stem cells to come in and wind it down, and so then, we’re always winding up into stress and then winding that back down into balance, and so then the, but if there’s too much stress for the body to handle, sometimes we just get stuck in this wound-up state. The cell therapies, I think are very interesting and then intra, and the exosome or the growth factor therapies are potentially as interesting or more interesting because those may be something that could be at a significantly lower cost. It could be repeated on a regular basis, and then I’ll, I’m starting to talk about this, which is that if you do a, there’s a couple theories out there for, how could we drive more growth factors to the brain? And so then one theory would be to give the exosomes IV and then do some an ultrasonic treatment that would increase blood flow and increase permeability within a segment of the brain, which tends to be fairly difficult to do and requires an MRI, and it requires a lot of technology. The other thing that you could do is you could do the stellate ganglion block and then do growth factors IV, and then those growth factors then end up because the blood vessels are dilated and potentially maybe even a little bit more leaky. That could achieve the same benefit or potentially I think better based on sort of what we’ve been seeing people, and so then now we’re using, we’re trying to drive product to the brain, and then that could be peptide. That could be growth factors, that could be cells, and then we’re trying to then manage that in context of this sort of total thought process of really optimizing biology, optimizing self physiology, and then supporting people with, in telling a positive, heroic story about themself as sort of, as they’re going through their healing process.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Well, I’m so happy there are doctors, smart, intelligent, dedicated doctors like you who are putting all these pieces together because so many people have been told, you know, by certainly well intentioned humans that there’s nothing that you can do for dementia, and yet talking to you, it’s almost overwhelming how much and the complexity of options that we have when it comes to reversing cognitive decline, and so hearing from you the pieces of the puzzle and how we might fit them together and how we can individualize this and come at it in a systematic way based on what that person is experiencing, and then what they’re responding to, and there’s really like, talking to you it’s, there’s no limit to the benefits that people can potentially get from this sort of approach.

Matt Cook, M.D.

But now, but, and then, but I, and one, then what I wanna, my reaction to that then is that this is the most borderline, the most stressful thing that can happen to a family that I know of, and so it’s so overwhelming and it’s such a challenge and there’s not a perfect solution, and in any one of those, these things is not a total magic bullet, and even all of it could not be a magic bullet and then cost is an issue, and so then, and so then you go, oh, okay, this is a big deal, and then also, what are we gonna do? Where are they gonna live and how do we take care of ’em? And what you have created is probably going to be the state of the art that all systems are gonna be based on in terms of your approach to where, what you’ve created in terms of a living center, but what my current trajectory of, and is in terms of thinking about this and talking about this is, is that we now have some very low cost ideas that we can support people with, and so then the peptide module is kind of relatively low cost, has some potential to be helpful, and so then now we’re beginning to think of, oh, okay, let’s do some things and just see how people are responding, building some low cost solution testing kind of concepts, and then doing some simple functional medicine, and so then you begin to say, could, without spending a lot of money, could we start to get some benefits? Can we manage inflammation? And then see if, you know, a lot of times, I feel like just with that, the whole experience of people’s family life gets a little bit better. Stress starts to come down. Then you’ve got the, some more interventions that come in, like the stellate ganglion block that tends to be relatively low cost too, and so now we’ve got a diversity of things that are gonna be helpful. Hyperbaric oxygen, I think can be very helpful, and so then now we’re building a whole bunch of things before kind of the expensive things and seeing how people do, but I think this is something that we can impact, and so it deserves our attention.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Yeah, and it, you know, you and I work with people across the board in terms of resources, and when we can, when somebody comes in with resources, who wants to push this really hard and get creative and, and just keep going and try everything, we get to see, we get to kind of do the research. We get to do the experiments, we get to get the clinical experience, and then over time that informs and creates basically economies of scale that can then help drive the price down and make things more accessible for people. So it’s definitely a both/and strategy, and no one wants to forget our conversation today was definitely about the exciting new things that we’re learning about and that we can layer on top of foundations, but that by no means would suggest that, like we can’t focus on sleep and exercise and great diets and all of the healthy foundational pieces that we know are critical to brain health, and then this is just what you can do in addition.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Yeah, and, you know, we talked about, and then even I like to dig into these low cost things ’cause like we talked about all this stuff. There was kind of sexy, complex stuff, but then, if we find mold, then we’re gonna give these people binders and pull that mold out of the body, and so then, and you’ll, it is sometimes with neurological patients, you’ll see like, mold toxin levels that are like, hundreds of times above a normal limit, and so then when you start to bring those down, sometimes that’ll change, and so I think I sit here cautious, thoughtful, and optimistic about the future.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

That’s exciting. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. I wanna make sure that everybody knows where they can find out more about you and BioReset.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Okay, go to BioReset.com and I think you should, you’re gonna find us.

Heather Sandison, N.D.

Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, expertise, and experience today. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you.

Matt Cook, M.D.

Oh, awesome. Thank you so much.