Dr. Scott Sherr has been a frequent guest and audience favorite with his information-dense guest appearances on The SuperAge Show. This week we speak about new information on some of the brain chemical influences on depression, sleep, and anxiety- specifically the overlooked neurotransmitter GABA. We review the symptoms of GABA dysregulation and the methods for correcting it. Dr Sherr is a clinician, meaning he sees patients and comes at the issues from a more nuanced point of view than pure researchers sometimes do. In the middle of the episode, Dr Scott brings up a surprisingly simple zero risk trick to increase sleep effectiveness. Toward the end of the conversation, David asks about how to increase concentration and focus, and we get into the practical usage of nicotine, methyl blue, and low-dose psychedelics.

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Key Moments

“So when I do analysis with patients, I'm usually looking at a gamut of labs and what I found over the last several years is that GABA is a big problem, and it's not GABA itself that you're typically looking at, but you're actually looking at some of the amino acids and some of the cofactors that are typically deficient in these kinds of patients that are having symptoms like that are very much correlated with GABA deficiency, and some of those are symptoms that all of us have gone through in our life. From a mental health perspective, we know GABA deficiency is associated with anxiety, with fear, with depression, with short temper, with phobias, with impulsiveness, with disorganization, and addiction.”

“The problem with GABA as a supplement is that it's a very big molecule and it doesn't cross the blood brain barrier very easily at all. There are only a couple of different ways to get GABA through. One of them is using something called nicotinoyl GABA or vitamin B3 attached to a GABA”

“Cava is a GABA agonist so it helps increase the amount of GABA that binds. It doesn't bind to that GABA site itself, it binds to a separate site a little further away, but it helps with increasing the amount of GABA that's going to bind and you're going to have that feeling of feeling like you've had a couple beers, kind of thing. But the nice thing about cava is it doesn't bind with the same affinity and it also binds to other receptors that help increase wakefulness.”

“The first part of this conversation is that nicotine is a fantastic cognitive enhancer. It's very short acting. It's about one to two hours and if you don't smoke it or vape it, keep it very low, and dose less than four milligrams a day. The chance of addiction is minutely small, minuscule. So it's very, very powerful and very quick, and so for people that are looking to feel more of a cognitive edge. They can actually just have some nicotine on its own and it will do that.“

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