➡ Dr. Andrew Kaufman discusses the concept of ‘brain fog’, a term used to describe cognitive issues like forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, and other mental impairments. He explains that brain fog is not a medical term but is often associated with long-term effects of COVID-19 and other conditions. He also provides a way to understand and assess if you’re experiencing brain fog, emphasizing that there are ways to recover mental capacities that may have been affected. He uses social media analysis and scientific papers to support his discussion.
➡ The text discusses brain fog and its associated health conditions like psychiatric disorders and autoimmune diseases. It introduces a free video called “Brain Hijackers” that reveals 10 hidden neurotoxins affecting cognitive health. The text also highlights the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a short, free test that can identify even mild cognitive impairments. It suggests using this test to assess cognitive health, but advises consulting a health professional for symptoms like dissociative episodes and fatigue.
➡ This text discusses a sensitive test used to identify memory problems and other cognitive issues, often linked to ‘brain fog’. The test is particularly useful for highly educated individuals, as their scores can reveal significant deficits despite appearing normal. The author reassures that there are many solutions available for those struggling with these issues, including nutrition, detoxification, and cognitive exercises. They encourage the audience to learn more about these techniques and take proactive steps towards improving their cognitive health.

You’re not lazy, you’re not broken, and you’re definitely not imagining it. Brain fog hits one in three people, and today I’m going to show you the signs that it might be affecting you. Welcome to the TRU Health Report. I’m Dr. Andy Kaufman, recovering physician, plandemic whistleblower, natural healing pedagogue, and legal code talker. You can call me the Truth Doctor. My mission is to shift your paradigm as we dive into radical forensic dissections, discerning fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, medicine from poison, law from legal fiction, and individualism from collectivism. This podcast is your channel for unraveling the truth about health and science.

Together, we’ll challenge the narratives, expose the fallacies, and empower you to become your own health authority. This is the true health report, where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Hello, everyone, I’m Dr. Andrew Kaufman, and today I’m going to talk to you about a somewhat nebulous subject, brain fog. Now, brain fog is not exactly a medical term. It’s more of a lay term, and it only came into existence in the past couple of decades. Now, if you look in on the Internet now or in the medical literature, you’ll often see brain fog associated with COVID specifically with long Covid and post immunization syndromes.

However, this term, as I said, is not well defined and applies to many, many different situations, and it may in fact be the only thing that you’re dealing with. So let’s take a closer look at how we can figure out if this is something that we are, in fact dealing with by looking at what other people say about it. Now, I just want to start off first and say that there are many well established causes of cognitive deficits, meaning impairments in your thinking, reasoning, memory, attention, and those domains that are known as your cognitive functioning or, you know, your intelligence, your smarts, your basic abilities with respect to that, that, of course, mostly are far ahead of the animal kingdom.

Now, these can include, of course, things like dementia and mild cognitive impairment, which is the beginning stages of dementia, but also things like attention deficits, concentration problems, brain injuries, and many, many other conditions that can result in some form of cognitive decline. So, without figuring out all the details about what is the specific cause of your condition, I want to give you a way that you can first understand exactly what brain fog means, at least to most people, and then also a way that you can ask yourself some questions. And I’m even going to go over a standardized assessment instrument to determine if you are not Performing at your best with respect to your cognitive abilities.

And this, of course, will be very important because in almost all cases, there is a lot you can do about it to recover those mental capacities that may have been slipping due to a variety of causes. So I’m going to discuss two papers today, and if you go to the link in the show Notes and go to my blog page, you’ll see that all of the references are displayed there, as well as the transcript of this episode. So that’s a great place to go for additional resources. It’s very important that everything that I talk about is referenced.

So this first paper is entitled what is Brain Fog? And this is a very interesting kind of exploratory study, because what they did is went on a social media platform, specifically Reddit, and they searched for posts that contained the words brain fog. And then what they did is they did an analysis to see what types of experiences people report. Now, they found 1663 posts that met the criteria. And out of those, they actually analyzed 717. So that would be included in these numbers. And there are various experiences that I’ll discuss one at a time that were reported.

And the most prevalent, 51% of these posts contain depictions of forgetfulness or, obviously, memory problems. And this is, of course, what I was alluding to in the intro to the show, that we might be more forgetful, misplace things, forget names, appointments, places, and things like that. And so this is the most common experience that. That people have. Now, of course, you may, in your own recollection of your own forgetfulness, you may be misled because you may sort of. We have a tendency to hide some of our weaknesses. So doing an objective test for memory is very helpful to make a more objective determination and see how your memory stacks up against the average individual.

Now, the second most common reported symptom is difficulty concentrating. And this, of course, is something that we’ve all experienced from time to time. But has it interfered with your ability to learn things or get things done? And I think it’s important that when we think about these types of symptoms that we always consider, has it resulted in a functional impairment? Like, are we unable to do something that we perhaps were able to do before? Or are we unable to meet our own objectives? Goals or the expectations perhaps of our boss or of the workplace as a result of a lack of being able to concentrate? So if you are unable to sit down and think about a complex problem and make decisions, it could be that your concentration is affected.

Now, there are a couple of symptoms Here that are not typically associated with cognitive decline, but are somewhat unique to this amorphous term of brain fog. And one of those is dissociative phenomena. Now, I want to explain what dissociative episodes or dissociation is, because this is a term that actually comes from psychology. And it was something that I have seen a lot in my psychiatric practice because it is associated with severe trauma. But it is normal that we all dissociate to some degree. And what it’s literally referring to is that our senses become disassociated from our internal mental experience.

So if you ever did an activity that you sustained your attention for a long period of time, like, for example, a long trip in a car where you were driving, you may notice at certain times that you suddenly kind of think, oh, was I just sleeping? Am I not paying attention to what’s going on? And you realize that, oh my God, you kind of lost attention, maybe you even missed your exit. But all of that time your senses and muscles were working together, that you were driving safely, you were staying on the road, you were staying in your lane, you were obeying the speed limit, or at least you maintained a consistent speed.

Perhaps it was above the speed limit. But nevertheless, your mind and your mental experience were separate from what was going on with your body and your senses driving the vehicle. And that is a dissociative episode or a dissociative experience. Now, when this happens more often than it should, or if it interferes with you completing tasks and activities, and you might even think about this similar to daydreaming, or even more seriously, if you end up in a different place while you’re dissociating and you don’t know how you got there, then this could be a more serious issue.

But certainly if this happens, you know more than on occasion, or if it noticeably interferes with anything, it’s definitely an issue. Issue that was in 34% of the respondents. The next most common symptom is cognitive slowness and excessive effort. So in other words, you’re not able to do complex tasks or problem solving or things that require a lot of thinking, planning, organizing, perhaps as quickly. And it requires more effort. And I think that this is the closest to what is known as executive efficiency functioning, which is a higher level cognitive domain which involves planning and organization.

And we’re going to look at how to assess that more objectively as well. But this is one of the ones I think you can know from your experience. If this is a problem for you pretty easily, and that was present in 26% of the posts that were analyzed. Now, the next ones were at a lower frequency, communication difficulties at 22%, fuzziness at 10% and fatigue at 9%. Now, communication difficulties is quite a vague and vast possible issue, but if we assume that it is language related, then we definitely can think about some specific issues with language.

Like word finding difficulties might be a common one that you’re talking about something, maybe from your memory and you can’t remember a particular word or in some other context of a conversation when you’re always having difficulty finding the right word would be one kind of example. Another would be is if you are putting sentences together in awkward ways or having difficulty explaining yourself that the other person is commonly confused. I think that looking really at who you’re communicating with and asking them about it might be really helpful to assess if this is really an issue for you.

Now, fatigue, which was only present in 9% of the posts, is certainly something different, and that refers more to generally to the body, because this wasn’t specifically cognitive fatigue, but fatigue in general or a lack of stamina. And this may be something that is more common with people who are also suffering from another other health problems that may not be able to be assessed from the way that they conducted this particular analysis. Because there are many other health conditions associated with brain fog, and some of them came up in the posts on the study, including, for example, psychiatric conditions.

And fatigue is often associated with depression and is one of the symptoms, or low energy is how they describe it there. But I think we’re really splitting hairs to say that fatigue and low energy are different things. Also, autoimmune disorders is another type of illness that they’ve commonly found in these posts and that also can be associated with substantial fatigue, not just from the medications, but from the illness itself as well. So I think we have a variety of domains to think about that are associated with brain fog, and I’ve given you a little information how to think about these things in terms of assessing yourself.

And this would be a good time perhaps to pause and consider some of these things or make a few notes to yourself, which are the symptoms that you want to look at or think about a little bit more carefully. If you’ve been dealing with brain fog, memory slips, slower thinking, trouble concentrating, there’s usually a reason. I made you a free video that breaks it down. It’s called Brain Hijackers and it reveals 10 hidden neurotoxins that many people are exposed to every day through food, medication, and even drinking water. I couldn’t post it on YouTube because even when I follow their guidelines, videos like this still get taken down.

Watch it for free at andrewkaufmanmd.com brain hijackers or just click the link in the show notes. You’ll learn what to watch out for and what you can start avoiding right now to protect your cognitive health. Now, I want to bring up one additional study that is about a particular instrument. Now, this assessment or screening tool really is what it is is called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. And I learned about this initially during my psychiatric training. And it is a pretty short test that is free. And in fact, in the show notes on my blog site, there is a link to the PDF, including the instructions.

So it’s a very short screening tool and it has really, really excellent psychometric properties, or in lay terms, statistics. So when it has been administered to people with even very, very mild impairment in their cognitive abilities, it has shown that it can do a very good job of differentiating those folks from people who have normal cognitive function. So this has become a gold standard to assess people with very, very mild cognitive impairment, which is technically called mild cognitive impairment, or mci. And this condition is thought to be the beginning stages of dementia, like Alzheimer’s disease. However, in other areas with different types of cognitive impairment, it is also shown to be just as good at helping you figure out if this is a real impairment or perhaps you’re a little bit just worried about nothing.

And so this study that I’m going to bring up is called the Evaluation and Extent of and Pattern of Neurocognitive Functions in Mild and Moderate Traumatic Brain Injury Patients by using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Score as a screening tool. And this study actually was done in India, but which I think is good that a Canadian instrument is being studied in India, but it’s because it’s a very valuable instrument. Now, earlier in my career, I actually did research with this particular assessment looking at competence to stand trial. So these are criminal defendants who may be suffering from a mental illness or a developmental issue, that they are of low intelligence.

And there is a legal standard that someone has to be able to understand their court case and their charges in order to go through trial. If they’re not competent to do that, there has to be some other type of remedy because it would not be fair. They wouldn’t be able to stand up for themselves and understand what they’re agreeing to. And it’s very challenging to evaluate these people. And there’s no systematic way to screen jail inmates for competence to stand trial. So I studied a population of jail inmates and who are having competence assessments done by two independent psychiatric experts.

And I compared the results of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment to that, and it turns out it was also good at predicting that. So it is a very good screening tool. And in this study that I’ll describe here, it was very, very helpful with traumatic brain injury as well. So what they did is that they recruited a number of individuals with traumatic brain injury that had already been fully assessed by other methods and was categorized as mild or moderate. Because, like I was alluding to earlier, one of the difficult things with a test like this is to detect a very, very mild impairment.

So this has been shown over and over again in different contexts to be good at that. And this was no exception. And so there were very statistically significant differences between the mild and the moderate group in terms of their impairment. And as well as differentiating the people with a mild traumatic brain injury versus people without any brain injury who have full normal cognitive function. And they found that a couple of the same areas that I talked about that were present in brain fog also were able to be discriminated very well using this instrument. And that includes executive functioning, memory, and attention, which were really among the most common of what we saw with brain fog from the other study.

So the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, in my opinion, is the perfect instrument. And it only takes about 15 minutes to do to figure out definitively if you have a cognitive impairment that you should investigate further. Now, let me just say that the dissociative episodes and the fatigue are not going to be assessed with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. So if those are the primary issues that you’re dealing with, I think that it would probably be a good idea to do a little bit more research about those experiences and consider speaking with a health professional. Okay, so I’m going to share my screen here.

So this is the document that you can download from the link on my blog website. And what you’ll find in this document is the Montreal cognitive assessment, version 8.1 in English. Now, it is available in other languages as well. Now, this is the actual test form, but what we also have in this document are the instructions, the administration, and the scoring Instructions. That’s version 8.2, and this is for version 8.1. So you need one other person in order to do this. And what you should instruct them to do is give them the instruction sheet and just ask them to follow it to a T.

Now, what they’re going to do is they’re going to give you instructions of how to complete this test. So you want to don’t read it ahead of time after you complete it and get a score. If you want to read it, that’s fine. But what you should do is don’t read the instructions, don’t look at the test, but print it out. And then, you know, ask someone to administer it to you and tell them to just follow the instructions word for word. Now, in the instructions, it actually tells the whoever’s administering the test, the proctor, exactly what to say to you in quotes.

So they’ll give you the ex, they’ll read the exact instruction for each thing. And then in there it even says that you can repeat the instruction up to two times upon request, but you’re not allowed to answer any questions or give any other kind of feedback. And it’s really important that you just follow the instructions. So because this is standardized to those instructions. And this is one of the things I really love about this instrument because other instruments don’t have specific instructions to administer it and you have to wing it. And I think that creates a lot of variability in the score.

This one is much more scientific in my opinion. Now I just wanted to go through the different domains that are assessed here and then talk a little bit about the level of education and why that matters as well. So we have here the visuospatial and executive functioning, and those are kind of related because it’s assessing your executive functioning partly in a visual spatial domain. So it’s going to test your sensory integration as well as your planning and organization. This is called a trail making test. And then there is the cube test as well and the clock drawing test.

And many people who have practiced in psychology or psychiatry know about the clock drawing test because it’s kind of a classic. So this top is going to assess those higher functioning areas in your cognitive domain, the executive functioning, which we saw was well represented in the reports on brain fog. Now, now we’re going to go into some naming and that is going to cover some language as well as memory. So some of those communication difficulties may be assessed in there. Then we’re going to go into a specific memory test and that is a very sensitive test.

So if you have objective memory problems, you will have some difficulties there most likely as well as on other areas of the test. Then you have a test for attention, then some additional language testing. Then we have abstract reasoning. And this may not apply as much, but it could be related to concentration and dissociation can disrupt this. And then we have the second half of the Memory test, the delayed recall, and lastly, orientation. And now, if anyone is not getting all the points for orientation, then you definitely need to undergo some additional evaluation. Now, the last thing I want to point out here is that.

And it tells you what a normal score is, and it tells you then to add one point if you did not complete high school. And this is actually important because it’s been shown in the testing data that people with higher levels of education have higher scores. So one time in a forensic setting, I was evaluating a math professor in graduate school, someone who was very advanced. Now, he would score a perfect score on an assessment like this, and he scored, I believe, a 28. Now, that is not low enough to be the cutoff for a problem.

But because he was so highly educated and intellectually advanced in his career, that 28 for him was very significant. And when we did more in depth testing, it showed the true level of deficits that he had, especially with his memory. And he couldn’t really go on as a professor. So I just want to caution you that if you are among those who are highly educated and in a very advanced intellectual pursuit, that you should expect to get nearly a perfect score on this. And you might want to change your cutoff a little bit. But I think for most of you, whether you went to high school or not, it’s probably not going to make a big difference because I think if you’re listening to this video, most likely, even if you didn’t have a formal education, you had an autodidactic education.

And that really counts just as well. All right. Well, today I introduced the topic of brain fog. That it is a nebulous term, difficult to define, but we looked at what the common experience actually consists of for people based on their social media posts. And then I gave a discussion about how to think about those issues for yourself and to assess if it’s really a problem. And finally, I presented an excellent assessment tool that can help you get a more objective answer to see if you really have a deficit there that is consistent with brain fog and should motivate you to take further action.

Now, I don’t want to leave you all worried that if you do have a problem, there’s nothing you can do about it, because there are many, many things that you can do about it, from nutrition to detoxification, cognitive exercises and rehabilitation. And of course, I try to identify the cause and make sure that you remove it and reconcile it. I offer many educational resources to learn more about these techniques. And I encourage you to go onto my website to check them out and get yourself some free educational materials. I look forward to seeing you again on the next True Health Report.

If today’s episode helped you connect some dots, don’t stop here. Brain fog is often the result of toxic exposure. Once you understand what’s behind it, you can start taking your mind back. Watch Brain Hijackers for free@AndrewKaufman.com brain hijackers. You’ll also find the link below in the show notes. Your mind is yours. Protect it, sharpen it, Trust it.
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See more of Andrew Kaufman, M.D. on their Public Channel and the MPN Andrew Kaufman, M.D. channel.