Ep. 39: Unlocking Longevity: Bridging Heart Health & Brain Wellness — with Dr. Cynthia Libert

Heart disease and cognitive decline can look like two separate problems — but they often share the same roots. In this episode, Dr. Regina Druz is joined by functional-medicine physician Dr. Cynthia Libert, a brain-health specialist trained in Dr. Dale Bredesen’s protocol, to bridge the two. They trade the ‘fire truck’ model of conventional medicine for a ‘master gardener’ approach to prevention, walk through the Bredesen framework of risk-factor subtypes behind cognitive decline (and how they overlap with heart-disease risk), and land on the single thread running through almost every case: chronic stress and cortisol. From there they get practical and refreshingly simple — gratitude, stillness, a weekly unplug — before turning to genetics (including ApoE4), precision medicine, and a buzzy ‘old drug, new trick’ study suggesting a common cholesterol medication might be linked to lower Alzheimer’s risk. (That finding is early and is discussed as a hypothesis, not a recommendation.)

Watch on YouTube: A video version of this episode is available on the Own Your Heart Health YouTube channel. Subscribe to be notified of new episodes.

Episode Chapters

[00:00] Introduction: Heart, Brain & “Old Drug, New Trick”
[02:06] From Family Medicine to Functional Medicine
[06:32] Fire Truck vs. Master Gardener
[11:15] Brain Health & Cultivating Joy in the Process
[15:46] Who She Treats & Starting With the Whole Story
[18:59] The Bredesen Risk-Factor Subtypes
[23:58] SMuRFs, Hidden Risk & Looking Deep Enough
[29:37] Stress: The Common Root
[32:30] Tending the Garden: Silence, Sabbath & Gratitude
[40:26] Shiny-Object Syndrome & Functional vs. Integrative Medicine
[47:00] Genetics, ApoE4 & Personalized Pathways
[55:19] Where to Find Dr. Libert & the Ezetimibe–Alzheimer’s Study

Transcript

[00:00] Introduction: Heart, Brain & “Old Drug, New Trick”

Dr. Regina Druz (00:02): Welcome to Own Your Heart Health. I’m Dr. Regina Druz, your holistic cardiologist. This week we’ll dive into common heart health concerns, uncovering root causes and unpacking scientific discoveries and controversies. The information provided does not constitute medical advice. Please contact your healthcare practitioner before making any changes that may impact your health.

Dr. Regina Druz (00:40): Hey everyone — another Friday fun day. This episode is special, because I’ve been making connections in my head for a long time between heart disease and other longevity-shortening conditions, like cancer and brain health. Today we’re going into the brain-health pathway. And if you follow the literature, you may have seen that just this week a drug we’ve used forever was shown to be potentially promising for Alzheimer’s disease — I call it ‘old drug, new trick.’ If you stay with us to the end, we’ll discuss it. My guest is Dr. Cynthia Libert, a star functional-medicine practitioner I look up to. Dr. Cindy, welcome.

Dr. Cynthia Libert (01:59): Thank you so much, Dr. Regina. It’s a pleasure to be here, and the feeling is mutual.

[02:06] From Family Medicine to Functional Medicine

Dr. Regina Druz (02:06): I’ll ask what I ask all my guests: how did you grow up to be who you are today?

Dr. Cynthia Libert (02:15): What a beautiful question. I grew up in the Midwest with a sister and loving parents — a really golden childhood, involved in sports and academics. I did my biology degree at St. Louis University, a liberal-arts education with philosophy and theology that gave me a good foundation. I knew in first grade I wanted to be a doctor, so I went straight through to medical school at Loyola University of Chicago. Residency was challenging — sleep deprivation and stress — and it was the entry into a long stretch of occupational stress. I had three daughters, the first during my family-medicine residency, then went into private practice rounding at the hospital, nursing homes, and hospice while seeing patients in the office.

Dr. Cynthia Libert (04:30): I went into family medicine because I love people and their stories, and I love finding creative solutions. But in the insurance-based, time-pressured system, it became all about reviewing labs, prescribing a medication, or referring out. It was disillusioning to watch patients decline over time despite the best of modern medicine, and I knew we were missing a piece — lifestyle, nutrition, fitness, stress management. It became glaringly evident in my own life too, with burnout and health challenges from years of occupational stress. That’s the root of how I shifted into integrative and functional medicine: my own experience taught me that part of being a successful doctor is taking care of yourself, so you can show up in fullness and actually help people.

[06:32] Fire Truck vs. Master Gardener

Dr. Regina Druz (06:32): You’re like my sister from another mother — same generation, same path. The traditional system churns physicians and breaks them, but it also breaks patients. As a cardiologist I had a front-row seat to sophisticated interventions that truly saved lives. But it occurred to me that modern medicine is a fantastic fire truck: if you have a fire, you get a wonderful brigade to put it out. Fire prevention, though, is on the patient, because the system isn’t set up for personalized, tailored care — it won’t tell you that your blood-pressure medication matters, but so does your poor oral hygiene, and your inflammation. So how did that shift happen for you, and what’s the core philosophy of your practice now?

Dr. Cynthia Libert (08:50): I love the firefighting analogy — I use it too. We’re blessed to have a conventional system that can be lifesaving in accidents and catastrophes. But for chronic disease we need to shift as a society. Instead of waiting for a firefighter to put out your fire, I encourage patients to become like a master gardener — to see their health as something to tend and cultivate, that needs sunshine, water, weeding, pruning, and care. It’s about empowering people to be proactive and in charge of their own health.

Dr. Regina Druz (09:58): That’s so well said — we emphasize partnership and patient agency too. The idea that chronic disease is a catastrophe, and that we should approach it only as a catastrophe, is flawed. Why ask people to wait for the catastrophe to happen before we help them, instead of giving them the chance to tend their garden continuously? Now, I’m a city girl — I walk through the garden, I look at the flowers, I’m not getting down and dirty in it — so take us through where one even starts.

[11:15] Brain Health & Cultivating Joy in the Process

Dr. Cynthia Libert (11:15): One of my specialties is brain health — specifically cognitive-decline prevention; Dr. Dale Bredesen is one of my mentors. There are so many root causes of cognitive decline — hormones, toxicity, micronutrient imbalances, inflammation — and the list can turn into a giant, stressful project. So part of my philosophy is cultivating joy in the process: building a life that is medicine, with rhythms of rest and renewal, enjoying whole foods, finding movement that brings the body joy, exploring creativity. Functional medicine is beautiful, but its complexity can itself create stress, so I help people relax around their health, build community around shared goals, and shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset — seeing challenges as opportunities to learn what the body needs, and taking gentle, grace-filled steps instead of conquering an anxious checklist.

Dr. Regina Druz (13:43): This really matters right now. I build AI tools and I endorse them for patients — so your patients and mine have probably fed their labs into an AI engine and come out with a long list of do’s and don’ts that sent them down rabbit holes. I also walk in the shoes of longevity doctors, and I tell my patients longevity is vascular first and foremost: I don’t care what else you do, but if you drop dead of a heart attack — which is what happens to most of the population — you haven’t fulfilled your longevity mandate. The problem with a lot of this work is that it’s complex, expensive, and short on clear outcome measures. Throwing the kitchen sink at a person doesn’t lead to sustainable change — it leads to anxiety and overwhelm. So with cognitive decline, who are your typical patients, and where do you start?

[15:46] Who She Treats & Starting With the Whole Story

Dr. Cynthia Libert (15:46): I take care of a lot of people in midlife — 40s, 50s, and beyond — but we’re all showing the signs of modern urban life: chronic stress, inflammation, metabolic and endothelial dysfunction. People come in tired, not sleeping well, with gut issues, perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms, high blood pressure, pre-diabetes, high cholesterol, inflammation — the same patients you see.

Dr. Cynthia Libert (16:58): One of the privileges of functional medicine is that I’ve structured my practice to spend a couple of hours with new patients. They fill out extensive forms ahead of time, and we start as far back as preconception — what was going on with their parents before they were born, their mode of delivery, each decade of life, major illnesses, accidents, and traumas. I let their story unfold and ask what matters to them. I always ask: if you had a magic wand, what would be your top three health wishes? Then we dive into the details of their life, rhythms, and even mindset — I listen for shame and self-condemnation, because those can sabotage us, and gently address them. From there we use Dr. Bredesen’s framework of risk-factor subtypes for cognitive decline.

[18:59] The Bredesen Risk-Factor Subtypes

Dr. Regina Druz (18:59): Tell us — the moment you say ‘risk factors,’ everyone’s ears perk up. I read The End of Alzheimer’s and looked at the Bredesen Protocol, and it was uncanny how much overlaps with what we do. What are the subtypes?

Dr. Cynthia Libert (19:43): I met Dr. Bredesen in 2016, and he shared this framework. Type one is inflammatory and infectious — anything raising chronic inflammation (rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, a poor inflammatory diet) and infections (Lyme, COVID-19, Epstein-Barr, herpes). Closely tied to that is the glycotoxic subtype — pre-diabetes, insulin resistance, diabetes, blood-sugar dysregulation. Then the atrophic subtype — deficiencies or a lack of the growth factors the brain needs: B12, magnesium, vitamin D, thyroid hormone, the sex hormones. Then toxic — environmental toxins, mycotoxins, heavy metals, pollutants, alcohol and drug use, even mercury amalgam fillings. Then vascular — a whole subtype; I even put migraine with aura there because of its impact on the brain’s vasculature over time. And finally trauma — physical trauma and concussion, but also emotional and sexual abuse, so I always screen for adverse childhood experiences. We peel back the onion through history, exam, vitals, waist-to-hip ratio, VO2 max, strength and body composition, and brain MRI with volumetrics. The first pillar is simply to uncover what the risk factors are.

[23:58] SMuRFs, Hidden Risk & Looking Deep Enough

Dr. Regina Druz (23:58): Here’s something I struggle with. In cardiology we know the standard cardiac risk factors — from the Framingham study and others — but we’ve recently formalized that many patients don’t have any of them. There’s even a name: we call them SMuRFs, standard modifiable risk factors, so a lot of patients are ‘non-SMuRF.’ On the surface those patients don’t look bad, yet we know up to 70% — or at least half — of heart attacks occur in people with completely normal lipid profiles. And there’s a real discrepancy between the burden of risk factors and what it translates to in the vasculature: some people have risk factors but preserved arteries, others have none but impacted arteries. In brain health, are we just not looking deep enough — and once you do the workup, what are the top things that almost always surface?

Dr. Cynthia Libert (27:04): Great question — my intuition says for heart disease we’re just not looking deep enough. Within the brain-health framework, almost everyone has multiple risk factors, something from each category dragging the brain down. Some of the most under-recognized are psychological and emotional trauma and the chronic stress they place on the body — we know chronic cortisol can erode and shrink the hippocampus, the brain’s main memory center. I suspect something similar happens vascularly, with chronic fight-or-flight activation damaging the vessel lining. We’re all at risk because of modern living: overstimulation from news, social media, and screens; an ultra-processed food supply; and a lack of deep, restorative sleep. We may not yet have a formal way to categorize all of it — but if you look deep enough, you’ll find the risk factors.

[29:37] Stress: The Common Root

Dr. Regina Druz (29:37): You and I are talking about the same thing: stress. People are so desensitized that they don’t know what it feels like to be relaxed — and even when they think they are, the physiology often says otherwise. If I had to put a finger on one factor that pulls it all together and potentiates these metabolic cascades, immune activation, and inflammation, it’s stress. And stress avoidance isn’t a sustainable strategy, because you often can’t execute on it — the real work is building stress resilience. In cardiology we’re now seeing work on neuromodulation, vagal-nerve stimulation, and the effect of high cortisol on blood pressure. Most people don’t have Cushing’s disease, but plenty run on high cortisol and will have high blood pressure — and no amount of cutting sugar fully fixes it until that cortisol gets turned off. As the old line goes, ‘we have met the enemy, and it is us.’ So what’s your first step in helping patients start tending their garden?

[32:30] Tending the Garden: Silence, Sabbath & Gratitude

Dr. Cynthia Libert (32:30): So many risk factors have a physical solution — nutrition, fitness, sleep — but so much of health also comes down to emotional and spiritual health. I bring out the ‘feelings wheel’ to help people identify and understand their emotions, because emotions drive our behavior and decisions. And I go into the spiritual realm, because so many spiritual rhythms are healing for the cardiovascular system and the brain — silence, stillness, and breathing can shift the body into a restorative place where it can heal. I encourage simple, free practices: a gratitude journal, just three things once a day — there’s solid science behind its impact on mental and physical health — and taking time to be still and breathe.

Dr. Regina Druz (34:33): That is very, very hard. I’ve been trying to work on it, and it’s almost impossible.

Dr. Cynthia Libert (34:42): We get hooked on a dopamine-cortisol-adrenaline cocktail of achievement. So being intentional and carving out even 30 seconds of breath work matters. Another practice that’s helped me is Sabbath — taking one day a week and saying, I don’t work on Saturdays. It’s a discipline, because we’re always available by phone and email, but silence, Sabbath, and gratitude can make a world of difference. They’re simple, but profoundly impactful — and they help people connect the dots between their lifestyle, their stress, and what’s showing up on their blood work.

Dr. Regina Druz (36:32): That’s profound — scheduling spiritual time with oneself, unplugging, even for a few minutes, and recognizing there’s something bigger than you. Whether you believe in God or something else, expanding your mind’s eye to say ‘there’s something more powerful than me’ is powerful. As a scientist, I think with rapid advances in AI — toward artificial general intelligence — we’ll have to face what makes us human, because our knowledge base is now available to anyone who types a question into a chatbot. So how do you handle patients who aren’t spiritual and just want the physical fix — ‘fix my insulin resistance, treat my infections’?

Dr. Cynthia Libert (38:37): Of course I care for atheists, agnostics, and people of all faiths. But I think we all crave love, meaning, and purpose, so I tap into that. With lifestyle medicine, fear is a poor long-term motivator — it works briefly, then fades. We want to come from deep meaning and alignment with what we feel we’re here to do. Most people are open to exploring what makes them feel connected to humanity, what brings joy, and what brings a sense of service — and then connecting the dots: tend your garden so you have the energy and vitality to care for the people you love and live out your purpose.

[40:26] Shiny-Object Syndrome & Functional vs. Integrative Medicine

Dr. Regina Druz (40:26): That’s the growth mindset, not the fixed one. We know the patients who come in fixed — the note that says ‘I want to be started on BPC-157, and that’s the only thing I want.’ It’s hard to explain that the real solution is to climb out of that rabbit hole and get curious. We’re a results-oriented culture, and it hurts us; it doesn’t give credit to the self-journey, which isn’t always fast or productive but has to be consistent. The patients who are consistent see tremendous success from even the simplest intervention, while the ones with what I call shiny-object syndrome — SOS, running from supplement to supplement — don’t change, and stay anxious and frustrated. So help our listeners understand: what’s the difference between functional, lifestyle, and integrative medicine?

Dr. Cynthia Libert (42:52): Chasing the peptide or the supplement is exactly the trap — it’s the conventional ‘silver bullet’ mindset applied to integrative and functional medicine, and it doesn’t work that way, because we’re whole, integrated beings; you can’t band-aid the problem with an herb any more than with a drug. ‘Holistic’ simply means seeing the person as a whole — mind, body, and spirit. ‘Integrative’ is an older term I identify with: taking conventional medicine and its diagnostics and pulling in complementary therapies — herbs, nutrients, prayer, massage. ‘Functional medicine’ is a whole new way of thinking — to me, it’s just good medicine: looking at the individual’s unique biochemical fingerprint, genetics, lifestyle, environment, and timeline, and seeing the body as an integrated whole where doing something good for the heart also helps the brain and the rest of the body. We’re more than a bag of organs.

Dr. Regina Druz (46:09): More than the sum of our parts. I identify as an integrative physician too, even though I’m certified in functional medicine. Integrative medicine started as bringing in less-conventional approaches — acupuncture, massage, supplements — without necessarily creating something new. The contemporary version, what I’d call precision medicine, lets us combine the root-cause approach of functional medicine with the specific interventions of integrative medicine and personalize it. Our tagline is that we make precision medicine personal. You can go down the path of medications and procedures, or the path of precision and personalization — and there’s overlap; it’s not safe to tell a patient to be entirely drug-free and never have procedures. It’s about figuring out the root causes and where to lean in or lean out to grow that garden.

[47:00] Genetics, ApoE4 & Personalized Pathways

Dr. Regina Druz (47:00): Let me ask about genetics. In cardiology we used to think maybe 30% of heart disease was hereditary, but a recent study in Science using twin data — teasing out confounders — suggested that up to 50% of what happens to us, especially in terms of longevity, may be genetically determined. In brain health, how much is genetic, and what’s your take? You and I, being in functional medicine, see genetics a bit differently than some conventional colleagues.

Dr. Cynthia Libert (49:12): In my niche, cognitive-decline prevention, Alzheimer’s is the main cause of dementia, and there are different genetic risk factors. Some are very serious and nearly autosomal dominant — amyloid precursor protein, or presenilin 1 and 2 — and if those are in your family line, it tends to appear each generation. Far more common is ApoE4, the so-called Alzheimer’s gene; I have many patients with one copy, and even a handful with two copies, who are doing well into their late 70s, so I don’t see it as the end-all. The old saying is that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger — it’s nature and nurture, and there’s so much we can do with the other risk factors that there’s real hope. I love functional genomics; I’ve brought a genetics-focused colleague, Carol McCarthy, into the practice to help people understand their SNPs and modify lifestyle to mitigate their genes. But when there are genetic variations, we take them seriously and address them the best we can.

Dr. Regina Druz (51:49): I agree completely. We run genetic analysis on nearly all our patients — I’m approaching 200 now — and I don’t think it’s even possible to have an effective plan without accounting for genetics. It’s not a final sentence, except in those rare heavily-burdened cases. For complex diseases like heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer, there usually isn’t one gene; it’s about pathways and interactions. Most Alzheimer’s still occurs in non-carriers who may have genetics that increase toxicity from common exposures, impair nutrient processing and methylation, or raise their inflammatory potential. The remarkable part is that labs available to practitioners now let us string variations together to read whole pathways — the road your body is set to travel — so we can keep you on a good road or slow down a bad one. At Holistic Heart Centers we actually use AI for this, through heartwell.ai: we feed in labs, genetics, and some imaging to derive a unique profile and even simulate interventions before they happen, which has helped us cut medications and use them judiciously while improving lipid and metabolic markers.

[55:19] Where to Find Dr. Libert & the Ezetimibe–Alzheimer’s Study

Dr. Regina Druz (55:19): So fascinating. Dr. Cindy, how can patients find you if they want to work with you?

Dr. Cynthia Libert (55:25): We have a website, caringforthebody.org, with our contact information, and I have a YouTube channel called Re-Think Aging with Dr. Libert, where you can get free information.

Dr. Regina Druz (55:47): Awesome — I’ll subscribe to Re-Think Aging. My hope is that listeners understand they have the tools and the means. For decades we’ve watched the relentless progression of chronic diseases and Alzheimer’s-type dementias; we’ve curtailed heart-disease mortality and held it roughly steady, but we still haven’t dislodged heart disease as the number-one cause of death in both men and women — and heart disease and degenerative brain disease are closely related. As promised, let me share that study. A new analysis looked at ezetimibe — brand name Zetia — an old cholesterol-lowering drug we use often in cardiology. Using animal studies, researchers proposed that ezetimibe may interrupt a ‘linchpin’ pathway: two proteins that should stay apart get clumped together, brain debris doesn’t clear, and that clumping — the amyloid and tau accumulation we associate with Alzheimer’s — plugs up the neurons. The idea is that ezetimibe separates that linchpin so cellular debris can clear. They then looked retrospectively at more than 900,000 people from the UK Biobank, matched by age and gender, and reported that those taking ezetimibe had a striking 7-to-10-fold lower occurrence of Alzheimer’s.

Dr. Regina Druz (57:30): I want to be careful here: this is early, hypothesis-generating work — animal studies plus a retrospective association — not proof that ezetimibe prevents Alzheimer’s, and absolutely not a reason for anyone to start it for that purpose. But it’s a fascinating example of ‘old drug, new trick,’ and I’ll put a short summary in our Holistic Heart University, which has a free tier — the link is in the show notes — so you can save it for your own use. Dr. Cindy, thank you so much; it was a pleasure.

Dr. Cynthia Libert (58:51): Thank you so much, Regina. It’s been a great pleasure.

Dr. Regina Druz (58:56): Thank you for tuning in to Own Your Heart Health with Dr. Regina Druz. This podcast is powered by Holistic Heart Centers. If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review us on your favorite platform. To learn more about our services, visit holisticheartcenters.com and subscribe to our YouTube channel — the link is in the show notes. See you next week.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do functional and integrative medicine differ from conventional care?

Both physicians use a ‘fire truck versus master gardener’ analogy: conventional medicine is a superb fire truck — lifesaving in accidents and catastrophes — but it isn’t built for prevention or personalized chronic-disease care. Dr. Libert distinguishes the terms: ‘holistic’ means treating the whole person (mind, body, and spirit); ‘integrative’ (an older term) means combining conventional medicine with complementary therapies like herbs, nutrients, prayer, or massage; and ‘functional medicine’ is a root-cause approach that looks at each person’s unique biochemistry, genetics, lifestyle, environment, and timeline, treating the body as an integrated whole. Dr. Druz adds a contemporary framing she calls precision medicine — personalizing the root-cause approach with specific interventions. This is general education about care models, not medical advice.

What are the Bredesen risk-factor subtypes for cognitive decline?

Dr. Libert, trained in Dr. Dale Bredesen’s protocol, groups risk factors into subtypes: inflammatory and infectious (chronic inflammation, a poor diet, and infections such as Lyme, COVID-19, Epstein-Barr, or herpes); glycotoxic (pre-diabetes, insulin resistance, blood-sugar dysregulation); atrophic (deficiencies or missing growth factors — B12, magnesium, vitamin D, thyroid and sex hormones); toxic (environmental toxins, mycotoxins, heavy metals, alcohol, and drug use); vascular (including, in her view, migraine with aura); and trauma (physical, including concussion, as well as emotional trauma and adverse childhood experiences). She notes these overlap substantially with heart-disease risk factors, and that the first step is simply to uncover which ones a given person carries. This is educational, not a diagnostic tool.

What’s the single biggest underlying driver of chronic disease they point to?

Stress. Both physicians converge on chronic stress — and the elevated cortisol that comes with it — as the thread tying together inflammation, immune activation, and metabolic dysfunction in both heart and brain disease. Dr. Libert notes that chronic cortisol can erode and shrink the hippocampus, the brain’s main memory center, while Dr. Druz points to high cortisol’s role in driving blood pressure that won’t fully normalize through diet alone. Their emphasis is on building stress resilience rather than attempting (often impossible) stress avoidance, using simple, free practices like gratitude journaling, breath work, stillness, and a weekly ‘Sabbath’ unplug. This is general wellness guidance, not personalized medical advice.

What is the ‘old drug, new trick’ — ezetimibe and Alzheimer’s?

Dr. Druz describes a recent study of ezetimibe (brand name Zetia), a long-used cholesterol-lowering drug. Animal research proposed that ezetimibe may interrupt a ‘linchpin’ protein pathway, helping the brain clear the debris (amyloid and tau) associated with Alzheimer’s; a retrospective analysis of more than 900,000 UK Biobank participants (matched by age and gender) reportedly found markedly lower Alzheimer’s occurrence among ezetimibe users. Crucially, Dr. Druz stresses this is early, hypothesis-generating work — preclinical data plus a retrospective association — not proof that ezetimibe prevents Alzheimer’s, and not a reason for anyone to start it for that purpose. Always discuss any medication decision with your own clinician. (Figures are as stated on the episode and warrant verification.)

Show Notes & Resources

Guest: Dr. Cynthia Libert, MD, IFMCP

Dr. Cynthia J. Libert is a functional-medicine physician and the founder and medical director of Caring for the Body, PLLC, a center for functional medicine in Asheville, North Carolina. Trained in family medicine (MD, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine; residency at MAHEC/UNC Chapel Hill at Mission Hospitals), she became disillusioned with the time-pressured insurance model and shifted to root-cause, integrative care. A certified practitioner of the Bredesen Protocol who studied with Dr. Dale Bredesen, she specializes in brain health and cognitive-decline prevention, blending conventional diagnostics with nutrition, lifestyle medicine, and the mind-body-spirit connection. She also hosts the ‘Re-Think Aging’ channel.

Caring for the Body, PLLC — Dr. Libert’s functional-medicine practice (Asheville, NC)
Re-Think Aging with Dr. Libert — her YouTube channel / podcast (free brain-health education)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Dr. Cynthia Libert — Caring for the Body (caringforthebody.org); ‘Re-Think Aging’ on YouTube
The Bredesen Protocol / Dr. Dale Bredesen — ‘The End of Alzheimer’s’ and the functional-medicine framework of risk-factor subtypes for cognitive decline
Brain-health workup tools mentioned — waist-to-hip ratio, VO2 max, strength and body composition, brain MRI with volumetrics, plus conventional and functional-medicine labs and genetic/SNP analysis
Free stress-resilience practices — gratitude journaling (three things daily), breath work, silence/stillness, and a weekly ‘Sabbath’ unplug
Ezetimibe (Zetia) & Alzheimer’s — a recent preclinical + UK Biobank retrospective study suggesting an association with lower Alzheimer’s incidence; PRELIMINARY and hypothesis-generating, NOT a recommendation to take ezetimibe for prevention (verify before citing)
Heartwell AI (heartwell.ai) — Holistic Heart Centers’ personalized cardiovascular-risk tool
Holistic Heart University (free tier) — Dr. Druz’s short summary of the ezetimibe study (link in the show notes)
Schedule a consult with Holistic Heart Centers — go.holisticheartcenters.com/apply

Holistic Heart Centers

holisticheartcenters.com
HeartWell.ai — AI-powered cardiovascular risk assessment
Address: 55 Bryant Avenue, Suite #6, Roslyn, NY 11576
Phone: 877-511-5166
YouTube: @reginadruzmd
Instagram: @dr.reginadruz
Podcast: Own Your Heart Health — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms

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