 Hey everybody. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us again for Dr. Jill Live. Just a little bit of housekeeping and then I'll introduce our guests for today. First of all, thank you all for your responses and donations and everything with the wildfires. It's been amazing to see the community respond and we've been able to give away some free air filters donated by different companies and products and I just want to thank you all in the community and even just listeners all over the nation who've reached out to means that how can I help. It's just been really precious to feel the support of everybody out there. Second, if you want to find me, you can find me at JillCarnahan.com. All kinds of free blogs and resources there. 10 years of lots and lots of data and information online and chronic disease and environmental illness and now the wildfires I've been writing about. So that's all free there. And then my product website is Dr. JillHealth.com. Once in a while we mentioned a product and you can find anything there. And then finally the YouTube channel has 90 plus interviews now and you can find all of these recorded there. You can also find all of the episodes audio on wherever you watch or listen to podcasts so iTunes and Stitcher. So today I have a guest I've had before and we had a great conversation and I know today will be no different. Sharon Hausman is the chief medical officer and head of research for Intellect's DNA. So we're going to be talking about some specific testing today that she's founded a company but I like I say with products and services I only talk to people that I really believe in the product and service and I'll talk a little bit about today of my experience using Intellect's DNA but it's a really profound help for these chronic complex cases and I just love Sharon for her desire to get the details out there and also to be research driven. So she and her team have developed a platform that makes genetics actionable for integrative and functional medicine and again I keep commenting on the bio but I want to say what so often happens is patients or you guys might have brought in these you know 400 page reports to your doctor and you completely overwhelm them and we love the data but it's not very actionable and that's one thing I love about Intellect's DNA is we have very specific data driven research based things that we can do about it because there's no sense in having all the data if there's nothing you can do about it and I know Sharon you'll agree this platform is being used across the US in in Australia in particularly to improve outcomes in brain related disorders so we'll talk about a lot about that today including memory loss and autism and mental health concerns so especially in these tough and that's been one of my experiences as well as some of these tough cases OCD, anxiety, insomnia, depression and then autism and the spectrum disorders. Recent publications focus on her work with reversal of cognitive decline, she co-authored a study done by Dale Bredesen and colleagues as well as on improving outcomes in children with autism which we'll talk about today too and genomic related environmentally acquired illness so as you all know I love to talk about mold and how it affects us and we'll dive into that today too. She is board certified in family and integrative medicine and she obtained both her master's degree and medical degree from Harvard Medical School. Welcome Sharon I'm so glad to have you here again. It's so great to be back thank you for having me again Jill. You're so welcome. So let's talk just a little bit about just the basics on IntelxDNA what is it? I want to be clear and then you can talk about this but it is a doctor ordered test so if you're out there as a public you know patient you can ask your doctor to sign up and get this for you but you can't order it yourself so tell us a little about the background of the company and maybe even a little bit about your story and getting into this field. Yes so I before I was a physician I worked in research because I thought I was going to become a PhD and I did a lot of different kinds of research but part of it was genetic research so long story short I didn't like spending my whole life on one little pathway so I became a physician and a family physician which is kind of the opposite of a PhD in terms of we specialize in people birth to death nothing too broad but I always knew I'd go back to research and after the 23 and me revolution patients would come to me and say can you use my DNA to help me figure out how not to get Alzheimer's or how not I did a lot of brain science how not to get heart disease how to help with my mood issues all of that and there was really no product out there really designed for physicians so there were things that could say oh you might do better with a little bit more vitamin E or vitamin A or B12 but nothing that said how come I am having high blood sugar when no one in my family had it how come I'm having memory losses because I don't have that ApoE4 gene that people talk about how come when I get exposed to mold I have all this brain fog but my husband can walk into the same building and have no problems and then so we started to build this tool and then I also met a wonderful scientist from Australia who is doing similar kinds of work trying to figure out how she could use people's DNA to untangle autism her name is Dr. Heather Way and so we then also joined forces and built our autism report and so we now are doing we kind of call ourselves our specialty being the brain but we're really the company that is driven by physicians needs and naturopaths and practitioners and PAs but clinicians to say when I have this patient in front of me and they're a mystery give me some clues as to how I can help them with in terms of what things dietary what things supplements even medications at times might be beneficial to them and what are the root causes causing one person to be so susceptible to these environmental factors and somebody else not being susceptible. Oh I love that concise description of what's going on because again as a clinician first of all you bring that knowledge of clinical experience but also the kinds of questions that we have like you come with this base of understanding like what do we need as clinicians and number one the complexity can be overwhelming like I love of all people I get stacks like inches and inches thick of new patients they're like is this too much my no I love data I love complexity however the genetics have been a consistent source of overwhelm because literally there's no way to go through in a visit a lot of times the way other reports and things are brought to us so I love how you really distill the information into kind of how useful and we'll talk in a second about what's the new things but I know you have a new way of doing your platform that you know next version and it's even better than before as far as really bringing to light the key points in my experience I tend to track the super complex chronic people have been everywhere done everything and I love that I love being a detective but with that also brings very unique genetic polymorphisms that maybe they're one in a hundred one in a thousand one in a million and because of that it's sometimes these pieces that I found through your test have been the game changers in the clinical outcomes which means for the lay person it means people get better when I know what to do and it's very specific for example someone with very severe fatigue and muscle weakness and OCD ended up having a thyroid conversion issue and another issue with dopamine metabolism that affected the predisposition towards brain disorder you know like mood disorders and then another patient had an issue her diet she was trying a certain diet and then we found out she was really really susceptible to glucose as a trigger for inflammation so we got her way off glucose low carb and it made all the difference and those things while they're fairly practical you wouldn't have known without that data what to do in that case and so when I got to a stuck point with these patients I did your test and it really got me unstuck and the patient made massive changes yeah and I think that that's the fun is because you have this patient and they come with these weird symptoms and of course we do have these reports so we'll have one report that we call brain optimization and that's geared at cognitive decline whether it's from classic things like ApoE4 but so so much more but classic things that contribute to Alzheimer's versus low oxygen to the brain brain ischemia versus environmental illness like not being able to clear pollutants but we also have all the inflammatory these inflammatory pathways these detox pathways these nutrition pathways and sometimes I'll have someone that's a mystery that has nothing to do with one of our topics of the report I had a woman who came to me she's a makeup artist and so she is a makeup artist in the film industry so she's doing you know body makeup face makeup and she has her hand go into these huge spasms and then the brush will drop so this you know like literally the actor will have to catch her brushing you know and she's doesn't want to lose her job but of course she also wants to be able to feel better she gets her toes and hands curling up and so I was trying the classic things like potassium and magnesium and then you mentioned our new report our new report kind of sorts and kind of puts the less common variants at the top and at the top of her report she was in the 1% of the population that could not recycle CoQ10 to its active form or vitamin E and so it was really really interesting so I was like let's try one thing let's just try going high on CoQ10 and vitamin E this week and literally within two days those hand spasms were gone and those foot spasms ironically she did call me that she got a stomach ache because the form of CoQ10 I gave her had a soy product in it and she's very allergic to soy but we we fixed that she's like I got the stomach ache that felt like soy but you know that was easy but it was amazing because literally you know we had been trying to figure out these spasms for months but then when we looked at that hot spot reports what we call it we were like well let's just address these we haven't addressed this really and then it was better in two days and we get not everybody we get that quite an instantaneous response but you usually with the hot spot report and the way that we now have it sorted by addressing those five or 10 or 15 SNPs that are kind of highlighted as the most most important because they're less common we often get improvement in things we wouldn't expect you think about magnesium is related to relaxing muscles but it's really important for mood it's really important for attention and focus so if you're bad at making it makes a big difference oh I love that and like you said so let's talk a little for the lay person who's listening first of all the the thing that you're testing is these differences in base pairs and how they express like a protein or an enzyme or something right so you're actually looking at the genetics and it might be the other thing I want to talk about is so what is it that we're testing and then the second thing is you mentioned this one in you know a 0.1 chance whatever why is it that those really unique mutations are the things that usually make a difference in the outcome do you want to talk just a little about those two things yes I'm just laughing because this afternoon my co-founder and I were having lunch and she was saying well one question I think that people are going to ask is why it's not the common variants that are more important and brilliant it's a great so you guys are great like and the idea the way I think about it is everybody has these changes so just to go back they're called SNPs and I always say that SNPs sound like they should be a little piece of cloth but they're it stands for a single nucleotide or like a single little letter in your DNA polymorphism or variant or change and when you make that change it sometimes has very minimal effects on function and sometimes has profound effects so for example that that one I was talking about with recycling coq10 it's in the nqo1 pathway and two copies of it which is only found again in you know like one percent of the population decreases your ability to recycle coq10 by 98 percent wow that's a big deal massive right and it's like the needle the what it is in my mind is you're telling me it's like the needle in the haystack right and when I was describing my experience it's like what's the needle I'm missing and I could be a brilliant clinician but I can't find that needle it just it takes a long time with trial and error and so the reason we look for these less common things is because they're going to help you solve those medical mysteries because something that is found in 47 percent of the population it's not likely causing a problem that's unique so if you look at our cardiac report there's a gene that promotes people to have hardening of the arteries calcium buildup in their arteries one copy of that gene really common 45 percent of the population two copies 20 some percent of the population but think of the prevalence of heart disease it is like 20 percent of the population so that's a more common gene but when I talk to my doctors and we do have doctors that deal with more common problems heart disease diabetes thyroid and they use our report because you know obesity because it just helps optimize health but when I talk to the doctors that are dealing with mold that are dealing with complex illness those are the doctors that are taking care of the patients that were told they were crazy because that doctor his goes well I've been in a moldy building and I'm fine so why should it be bothering you you must just be oversensitive or you must just be kind of crazy they don't say crazy but they're going oh you're really sensitive to things you know and then the patient leaves feeling it's their fault well it's it's true they're really sensitive to things but it's not because they're being emotional it's because they're in that one percent or two percent of the population or five percent even that has gene variants so a change in their DNA that they can't properly kick out those mold toxins or they can't properly defend for example against Lyme disease when they're when they're first being exposed to it and so they get a higher burden which gives them a higher chance of having it persistent so what we're learning is that as we understand the root causes the things that make people different we then can come up with targeted ways of helping them to kind of support themselves and there's hundreds of options at any supplement store of what you can do but this is kind of saying okay if I'm only going to use five things what are you going to be the five that help me the most love that and thank you so much for just making it so clear because I'm sure you know you're not a physician you're like what are you talking about what does it mean no no it's good because again we have a lot of clinicians who listen to and I'm I'm sure that they will enjoy this episode as well and like you said this is a test that is ordered by your physician any physician can sign up is that correct what kind of account people do you yes there's no cost for a physician to have an account and it said that the the thing that is what I would call the rate we've met us and we talked about the rate limiting step I think the one thing that physicians need to know is none of us really got a good genomics education in medical school or in your nurse practitioner training or even naturopathic training so we encourage anyone to sign up but know that in order to use it effectively you do have to say I'm going to dedicate a weekend to really learning this and we do have a great training platform we kind of call it genomics university yeah that we have that they can learn and get started and we will for all your Dr. Jill listeners be happy to give them complementary access to the learning platform when they order their first report but it really is not worthwhile for a physician to sign up and go I can just skip the learning platform I don't have to do it I'm really smart I'm going to be able to do it I've trained lots of super smart doctors and everybody finds that the learning platform really really helps them to get the hang of it so even though in our tool next to the gene function and next to the gene variant we say this is how this gene works here's why it's clinically significant here are ways that you can have potential interventions having the genomics university and kind of going through case studies and seeing how it fits in and see how to use the tool so you don't get overwhelmed and go do I have to look at 600 things absolutely not you really want to focus on the top six panels or the top six things but if we didn't have 600 things we wouldn't work for most humans that are having problems that make them unique we would only work for the person that's like you know has no problems so I love that because you have the and I'll just attest to that too because I'm we were just talking before this like I've been wanting I've been done a few of the courses I've it's on my list of the whole thing was with give my book in and now I can have time to learn and do these things but it has literally been on top of my list year and for a while of going through that real in depth I've done a few modules but so I highly recommend that and I love that so again if you're a patient listening you're like I'm really interested you will have to ask your physician to order this or to get an account but it's free it's not going to cost anything difficult and we also we realize so one of the things we realize about genomics is it is so new that physicians like to do things well I mean why would we do something and kind of go oh well I don't really know how to do this but I'll do it so we walk physicians we kind of have a mentoring program that is also free where we walk you through your first three reports so that you can get the same great success with your first patient as you do with your 30th so there's nothing nothing to be afraid of I do some of the walkthroughs my research staff helped me with some of the others and it's once you've done four or five you're going to be really hooked because it's so much more fun to practice medicine when you are able to figure out what's going on than just to go oh well maybe this will work even things like people who have high blood pressure that get labeled treatment resistant hypertension it's not that there's something wrong with them that's different it's that you're not addressing the root cause I love that and I like I said I can attest to that as well you've been amazing at helping me walk through my first reports and I felt like this massive aha like wow this is really really important information and really now we're competing against machines right I mean our society technology AI is going in that direction so if you're a clinician listening I'm just going to tell you something real important here if you don't up your ante in your game and get to be doing the complex things machines are going to replace us I have no doubt we already have all kinds of AI apps that are doing basic primary care which is crazy to me but it's true so really truly the complex the level of stuff that we do and the and this would give you a tool to be an expert in your field because you're going to have data and information that you may not you know have access to with the routine cbc and cmp in our routine blood panels yeah I always think of it that you know blood work we can get it a 10 20 30 data points which in no mix you can get it so many hundreds or thousands of data points tens of thousands eventually we're still building the tool for so many other things and it's I think it's also for me and most of the clinicians that I've talked to so satisfying to take something that people say you can't treat so we have a publication coming out for example it's um it's publication done in three different offices of case studies with people with cognitive decline all of the people in this publication happen to have apoE4 and so if you kind of go oh well they've apoE4 it's nothing you can really do but by looking for the other underlying etiologies that these people had contributing we were able again I say we but I purposely was not one of the treating physicians from a non-bias standpoint when we do publications I want the cases to be from other doctor's offices but the physicians were able to get huge gains in cognitive improvement and they were all different reasons yeah one person had problems with their nitric oxide pathways for your patients who are listening or your lay people nitric oxide is what makes blood vessels open up from small to big if your blood vessels are clamped down in your brain then you're not going to get enough oxygen to the brain and so then things were done including hyperbaric oxygen for this patient and they got tremendous improvement in their cognition and then of course also addressing other pathways another person had problems where he had too high of fibrinogen in his blood and too thick of blood and so he was the doctor was able to see that he also had some other problems again and different pathways I'm oversimplifying right but so then they gave things like lumbrochinase which is something that kind of thins the blood and pycnogenol and addressed all these other issues that and the patient did much better and the third patient had already been accepted into an Alzheimer's study because she had a positive amyloid PET scan and so that was she's an ApoE-44 and she had a lot of problems with both gluten sensitivity that she did not know about and with detox issues so we gave her things to help support her glutathione which is kind of the glutathione is kind of the master paper towel of our brain it picks up all the toxins and helps you kind of get rid of them and we gave her things we obviously taught her how to use a gluten-free diet how to use how to eat in a gluten-free day and then again we addressed other things there were some vitamin pathways and we can't change the fact that she's an ApoE-44 but instead of having a score of 21 on her cognition score she has a score of 27 that's really different 21's the borderline between Alzheimer's and you know and having a mild cognitive impairment 27 is the bottom of normal so that's a huge difference in terms of function that's amazing and I love how each of those had this one thing we would say oh they're all in one bucket but they're really not you separated them out and we're able to do individual variations um let's talk briefly about environmental illness which is a lot of my listeners deal with whether it's um and I always say functional medicine can be basically simplified into infectious burden and toxic load now of course there's other little variations like inflammation driven by those but at a core most of the stuff we deal with is environmental toxins and then infectious burden and I think now like with COVID we're seeing more and more of this there's a lot of evidence now that post COVID some of the long haul is related to viral reactivation and certain subsets of T cells that are impaired after COVID and maybe long term so there's all these kinds of things let's talk though environmentally acquired illness so it could be Lyme or mold or some of these things what are some of the things you see that might differentiate someone with mold related cognitive brain fog or depression or anxiety versus you know what are some of the variants you might see in these kinds of cases yeah that's a great question Jill I think the way I like to think of it is I'll think of a couple of my mold patients how they were different and so there's a lot of things that contribute to brain fog and mold and we kind of see this clinically so with one person they might have variants that make them have higher reactivity to their allergic system so that has to mean right there's certain vitamin D receptors that activate the mass cells there's certain inflammatory interleukins which is just a word some of the the different interleukins will go down different pathways but one of the interleukin pathways triggers mass cell activation and so the person who has more of that kind of mass cell I had one patient she had really heavy heavy mass cell and also a pathway that triggered micro glial inflammation and that pathway is really rare it's only about two point two percent to point five percent of the population so for her for that micro glial inflammation and micro glia for our listeners that are going what's a micro glia um a micro glia are the garbage collectors of your brain so they're kind of an immune cell that's supposed to kind of get rid of waste products in the brain but they can also trigger inflammation and they can also relate to chronic fatigue and your response to viruses so micro glia you can address with things like green tea extract you can address it with low dose naltrexone you can address the mass cell type things with corsetin with luteolin obviously things like singular but also quail egg protein for example has great mass cell and so the things that helped her were one category and then in the same month we had another woman who had bad mold issues in her family but she was not that oh so the first person who got more of the pot's picture the kind of problems with keeping her blood pressure and heart going fast and all those symptoms because that's what that cat you know that combination led to the second person was the one who gets such brain fog and such fatigue so you know how some of the mold patients they don't want to get out of bed they can't do anything they really it can mimic depression um and they just they just feel like i can't do anything and so the second person with that her issues were more mitochondria yes and when your mitochondria get kind of off you're just kind of you have no energy that's your back of energy source and then she also had some major detox issues but there's a whole lot of different detox issues and hers related to what we call efflux transporters so i will explain that so efflux transporters are simply put the bouncers so the bouncers in your brain are supposed to be able to recognize stuff that doesn't belong there and kick it out so there are certain bouncer gene variants that help recognize some of those different mold toxins and say get out of my brain get out go kick it back out of the blood brain barrier she had two variants in her bouncer genes and so she got that tired thing so for her things like k-packs which is a mitochondrial support vitamin um things there's a ATP 360 you probably have other suggestions or ATP fuel that kind of helped her build her mitochondria up things that help lots of coq 10 um for the detox pathways lots of sulforaphane um which is from three-day-old broccoli sprouts but you can't just eat broccoli uh so we i think one cap is two pounds of broccoli so if you take it yeah it's it's pretty hard to get that amount every day so yeah yeah so we used what the what johns hopkins version you know of that instead uh that what they used in the studies with autism so i think that there's all these different things and so you go to a mold website and you read oh egcg can help you and sulforaphane can help you and clay can help you and this can help you and magnesium can help you and mitochondrial supplements and coq 10 and you're like well what do i start with so both those people are well there were both some of my first patients um and they are now supporting other colleagues and friends and uh people when they get mold but they're living their lives and in fact the woman who had the mast cell and the um micro glia when i asked her if she could if somebody who was really stressed over her new diagnosis of mold illness could talk to her because she had to live in a trailer for over a year while she was redoing her house right she's going yeah you know what i almost forgot about those years right oh i love it that's amazing memory yeah yeah you can kind of like pass through and then i love that and it makes so much sense and my personal experience i have all kinds of weird genetic things some there's some glutathione issues in that but it really did help even for me because i was someone who didn't tolerate a lot of glutathione i would oxidize it so that was one thing that that everybody says you know glutathione but for me that it made it worse same with nad this powerhouse of a nutrient we love for me i crash and burn if i have a very narrow window and so i can do a little but i i deplete methyl donors if i do too much and i crash and so that's one thing i have a platelet issue so a lot of these inflammatory disorders make my blood thicker kind of like your person with a fibrin so then i'm more prone to clotting in that and i've noticed that at different times in those interventions and then you mentioned nitric oxide and i'm on the other spectrum where i produce too much i'm in like a 0.01 percent variant so i've noticed i get really hypertensive like blood pressure of 85 over nine you know like 85 or 55 when i get an emolved exposure so it makes a kind of sense yeah exactly complete so let's talk a little bit about autism a lot of patients and people you know have friends and family that it's literally becoming i think it's above 25 percent now in some you know areas i don't know what the percentages are but there's a very very large percentage of diagnosed autism what can you find there what are some of the stories that you've seen well i wouldn't have been willing to talk about autism until about six months ago because we were still testing and one of the things we do at entelix dna is when we build a panel until we so or we build a report we kind of go okay this gene has been associated with autism this gene's been associated with autism we kind of put them all together we figure out how the gene works how you should be able to address it but we don't actually release the panels or train physicians on it until a group of expert physicians in the topic have used the panel and say yes it's ready to go it's working so we are now really feeling excited about the fact that our all of our alpha testers have said this is helping tremendously and we do have a publication and at the end i'll be happy to show people where they can access that on our website with some of the initial cases that come out of australia but looking at some of those root causes whether they be problems with how the brain hooks together like that's called brain plasticity or problems with neurotransmitters how you handle dopamine and norepinephrine and adrenaline or problems with nutrients things like magnesium folic acid things that make you predisposed to supposed to glutathione problems gut problems all of those contribute to autism mitochondria as well and so what there's some fun cases there's one case of a young man who's given me permission to talk about his case and he is the first case in our publication that came out last year in the journal of personalized medicine and he is a young man who was diagnosed with autism profound at age two and he was nonverbal his mother worked with him extensively and then met then became a nutritionist actually so that she could help her son and she got some benefit by going like gluten free dairy free all of that but on a score of like one to plus a hundred um having a low score like a normal that's normal a neurotypical child of a score of less than 20 her son had a score of 114 when first tested on the atek so she met dr. way in australia who was our initial alpha tester they got his score to 71 it was still so much better and that was using getting rid of inflammation addressing gut issues all of that but then they got our genomics a few years later they retested him he was still at 71 and they were able to understand why he was having some brain plasticity issues and one and that particular gene needed huge amounts of zinc and um to help overcome it oxytocin helped overcome it melatonin so they they addressed that they addressed some mitochondrial issues that he had they addressed other issues particular kinds of inflammation one that responded to sulforaphane and the the long story short is a year later this young man had his IQ go up 20 points wow he was mainstreamed instead of being in a special school because of that he was able to speak so much better because it wasn't that he really had that low IQ he was kind of locked in there because of some of the plasticity issues wow and he got a job in a cafe he got a driver's license wow he eventually saved up money and bought a car and he is now actually helping his mother with her online platform and has taken some bot in like pre college courses and bought me so he was wetting his bed every night and now he's not and that's an extreme case but i just got an email from a patient that i have been helping um and i have only had one visit so far with his son that was already mainstreamed in school doing well and the father said you know with the changes you've made my son used to answer one word sentences like okay and he gave the example of you know they were they saw girl scott cookies um being for sale and the father said we'll we'll get girl scott cookies another time and instead of the son saying again no or you know why or something like that he said but why they're here right now yeah in full sentences when he used to answer questions with one word and again that's with one visit and we added about five things we changed what he was doing and add about five things and so it's so i'm really excited about that work i do have to warn uh you if you are a family member apparent that that work just finished its alpha testing which means we only have um we only have coverage in about 15 states in the united states right now we are training a whole new group of doctors in march if you are a clinician and want to get trained uh we would love to train you reach out to us um so that you may if you want to learn more about that um obviously you can go to our website and email information but unless you're in one of the states that we have a doctor trained there may be a slight way but you can nominate your doctor and it's yeah and give me the website right uh for just for your first of all for your company because people are asking i want to put that in right now so if you're listening i'll put that in and you'll see it below if you're watching this recorded and i do want to say that it's really important that italics dna is not meant to diagnose so it's not meant to diagnose a disease we're not looking at pathogenic variants so there are some children with autism that or some people with Alzheimer's that have what's called a pathogenic variant um and that's we're not looking for that what we're looking at is common variants so things that we don't look actually at the one in a million variants yeah we look at the things that are found in from about point five percent of the population on up and so those are considered common by geneticist terms they would not even show up in a whole genomic sequencing report because they're not pathogenic they don't cause disease but when you combine somebody who can't stop inflammation yeah or who makes too much brain inflammation with different insults like you had mentioned environmental so for example there's some evidence that sometimes tick-borne illness can be a trigger for autism um there's all kinds of fascinating research that's not a common you know the common cause but it definitely is out there but we're looking at common variants but looking at 20 or 30 common variants together could cause problems and so that's more the child that they're born and they seem pretty neurotypical um and then they regress those kids do really really well with genomics or in some cases some of the children um that are born with autism clearly many of them will still get significant improvements they may not get quite neurotypical when you address their nutrients their gut their brain plasticity and and brain chemicals does that make sense a hundred percent i love how you'd frame that because we still do this great functional medicine baseline we do the diet we do the lifestyle we do the basic nutrients but in this has been my experience too it's when we get to that point and maybe we should be doing it for everybody sooner but it's always like you do the basics and then this is the detailed work like the you know uh extracting the you know the details out of the needle in the haystack kind of example of where the real things that might really make a difference in this particular like you said personalized approach yeah yeah so it's a clinic that's what we call the clinical decision support tool it's purpose just like farco genomics the doctor might order a test to go well what medicines do you metabolize well and which ones we more careful with this is the same kind of principle a physician orders it or a healthcare provider to say let me better understand what might be part of the root cause and then the physician or clinician makes the decision what makes most sense for my patient because we'll give a number of choices of things that might work on that pathway and they go oh i think for this history and this going on i'm going to try x y and z yeah and what i love too is there's definitely sometimes medications that are appropriate but you also include all kinds of research based recommendations for nutrients and whether it's a vitamin or mineral or whether it's a thing like broccoli extract or resveratrol or whatever we're doing i think that's a really good point i think that's one thing that differentiates us from other genomic tools as well as other people's kind of work in this space is because we're a clinical decision support tool by definition every single sentence in our report has to have a reference so if we say sulforaphane might be an intervention for the interleukin one beta gene in autism we have to have evidence not only that that interleukin one beta gene variant has been associated with autism but that sulforaphane has been shown to cross the blood brain barrier and help in outcomes in autism so we don't put just anything in the report um i have doctors all the time come and say oh you know have you considered putting such and such in the report we're always happy to add new interventions i say send me the reference yeah showing where it helps and the mechanisms and then we vet it and then we can add it and then we have discussions of the interventions and the doting in the studies so that physicians can know is it study done in an adult or a child what were the outcomes a little bit more about what's going on so i love the autism go ahead i'd say sometimes in autism the actual autism part of the study they will have animal models but then like so but then they will have done human safety studies in adults but they won't have biopsy the brain to see to decrease the it's frowned upon to biopsy children's brains yes thank goodness oh i was going to say that that's the thing that I think differentiates you and what you're doing from a lot of the other ones out there and i won't name any names but we were talking about that before where there's some recommendations but it's all based on hypothesis and not really based in like clinical evidence i think that's a slippery slope it can be tricky you know to really yeah and and again because of my research background because I thought I was going to become a phd those couple years at Harvard doing my master's degree I really understood what we need to do of the clinical process to prove to the scientific community that something makes sense and I my ultimate goal of course is that we do go through all the levels of clinical trials needed so that there's very very clear evidence that this is a great approach for precision medicine and we are at different levels of those kinds of studies um with different um with different topics we're uh actually just uh supporting a study in autism that will be starting in uh march on the east coast I don't want to give too many details about it yet but it's not being done through intelligent DNA um it's being done through an organization that is in the autism world and then um well actually and yeah I have to get their permission to see who it is but I will let you know Jill if you can do it they're always looking for people to help support their research and then we can post that I love it and then we're going to do a prospective study um some more prospective study work in the cognition field and then we are working with some physicians to get more case studies and more publications in the mental health field as well because during COVID depression and anxiety those have been huge and being able to help people kind of untangle why they tend to get so much more anxious than somebody else has been really beneficial yeah gosh I think we're again briefly talking before we get on here I think it's about 400% increase in prescriptions for SSRI during COVID and that just shows you the state of uh I think fatigue and stress and all these things that are contributing and it's often like you said if there's a threshold where people are life is pretty good everything's going well they may not hit that genetic tipping point where they actually become depressed but there's been so many stressors and so much going on isolation during COVID that I think a lot of people have hit that tipping point and with testing like what you do you can find out what is causing that is it a nutrient is it a inflammation yeah and at the top of both the depression and the anxiety panels so just I keep referring to these panels yeah our report is a collection of about 20 panels all of our reports are going to have what I call functional medicine basics things relating to nutrients inflammation detox gut but then they'll have particular panels relating to the topic so in our mental wellness panel we're going to have depression and anxiety and OCD and addiction um and and those kinds of things um pandas and pans isn't you know neurodevelopment we have all kinds of topics but in our depression and anxiety panel um the serotonin transporter one of the serotonin transporters is at the top and it does make people have like 2.4 times or 140 times the risk of depression and those people might respond really well to kind of pushing serotonin but that's not everyone and so and even those people might also have problems where they have problems with certain amino acids or problems with cortisol and so I think that um it's really helpful to kind of look for the underlying root causes particularly if somebody has started on a serotonin medicine and they're like I'm not really fully well or I'm not getting better at all right then you go well maybe it's not serotonin that's your issue there's a lot of things that contribute to depression yeah I love that and really at the core this is just helping us do personalized medicine so I love that um because again that's what most of us do an integrative personalized and functional medicine want is to have that personalized approach so let's end with first of all where I put the website your website in the links here and we'll have it wherever you're watching or hearing this you'll have a link um to find the website but let's talk about if you're a patient what do you do if you want this test if you're a clinician talk about those two groups and give people resources on how they can get connected can I share my screen and then I can just kind of show some things on the website yes absolutely once I care I'll get you okay I'll set okay so let me share here and so I'll make it a little so this is our Intellect DNA website and if you uh that's the home page if you are a clinician click on the clinician and you can request a demo or request an account or ask your questions if you're a patient click on the patient one that'll help you find a provider that's licensed in your state and give you more information um if you just want to learn more if you click on our podcast and video page you'll see Dr. Jill from our last talk right up at the top but there's some different podcasts and videos that you can watch one this is with Dr. Bredesen this is with Dr. Pearlmutter I was scheduled to do another one Dr. Pearlmutter um but uh we have to delay it will be soon and then if you are someone who wants to read more science you can read some of the publications um and so that's where I would recommend just hop on our hop on our website and please do not call we are a small team it is much easier um for us if you don't mind if you email or go through the website to reach out for information and just for those listening who aren't in front of the computers give the spell out your website just give us the website for those listening intelligent so it's www.intel.xxdna.com and the way to remember it is it's an intelligent approach to dna so intel i n t l l from intelligent two x's because the co-founders are two women and the two x chromosomes and then dna so love it yeah I love that you said it works I didn't even know that and I've known you in the company for a while Sharon um as always such a pleasure love what you're doing um we'll have to update again in six months or a year because I'm sure there'll be new things coming out thank you for the work yeah thanks for your work that you're doing in the world and for this great tool that we have thank you again for having me Jill it's always a pleasure