Peter Attia· MD
and the lactate is the fuel for neurons
Loading…
The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
and the lactate is the fuel for neurons
Every Sunday: the week’s new conflicts and verdict changes — and nothing else.
Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
The next day we infused lactate to 4 molar it completely stopped the glucose uptake no glucose uptate in a pet St skin I can show you the image
but now we have instead of the six carbon molecule we have couple of three carbon molecules and the lactate Transporters are highly expressed in the brain
George so if I mean that clearly demonstrates that lactate is preferred over glucose but I think the jugular question is is is the brain getting more ATP from the lactate as a preferred fuel than the glucose which has one area of hypo profusion in other words are you able to by providing the preferred fuel actually get more energy to the neurons that are injured
And we actually have done six patients. In collaboration with our colleagues at UCLA, we show that we can increase the carbohydrate uptake, that is the total of glucose plus lactate, in people with brain injury by infusing lactate.
For some reason, the breakdown of sugar, or in the brain is impaired after injury. The product of that is lactate. And neurons run on lactate as the preferred fuel. So, in part, the brain is starving. So, you can try to give more glucose by putting that in the blood. But, again, the process is blocked.
They noticed that in their patients who did better, as you described, their lactate was elevated and the people whose brains could take it up did better. And that means that they recovered quicker and their intellectual functions were restored pretty much as they were before they were injured.
And now, we can see that, after injury, the whole body knows the brain is injured and the whole body mobilizes its efforts to fuel the brain. And part of that is lactate being produced peripherally. And it does a couple things. Of course, it goes to the brain and it can get across this blood-brain barrier and can help fuel the brain.
So, our approach is to bypass that by infusing formulations containing lactate salts and esters and other lactate-containing compounds that will get into the brain through the blood-brain barrier, and get into the mitochondria, and fuel the brain.