Health Benefits of Fisetin

Scott: Doctor, can you go into some of the health benefits of fisetin? What do we know about it?

Dr. Puya Yazdi: So like I said the most broadly way of speaking is it's a very, very powerful antioxidant. So like all antioxidants it's really good for age-related declines all over your body. Specifically one of the things fisetin is known for being very good for is, you know, fighting age-related declines in the cardiovascular realm. You know? But what makes it unique among all the other flavinoids is that in addition to that some of the mechanisms are extremely powerful in your brain. So the way we group it is, well, these are all very similar to antioxidant mechanisms, is that what makes it extremely unique is that it can actually cross the blood-brain barrier. So this is very important.

A lot of the stuff you eat, while it may be beneficial to the brain, actually can't get there. Your body does not like stuff getting into the brain. Makes sense, you get a virus in there, suddenly your life is at risk as opposed to if you have a virus in your GI tract or somewhere else, you know, you have some discomfort but your life is not at risk. 

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Puya Yazdi: So the body over the years has basically found a very powerful way to keep stuff out of there. But that also makes it hard to get nutritional stuff in there that's needed to fight some of this age-related decline. Fisetin crosses the blood-brain barrier.

Now, what does it do when it gets there? Well, what it does there is that besides doing the antioxidant thing what's also powerful is that it's also a great anti-inflammatory. Now why does that matter? One of the things is that the human immune response is extremely powerful. You know, if you look at most animals in nature none of them have an immune response as powerful as the human immune response. It's one of the reasons that the human species, over the last millenia, over the last almost, like, half a million years have been able to go from one continent to another, to a new location and be able to survive when they get new viruses and new bacteria in there. Because their immune system is so strong that it can fight everything off. That's a very good thing.

But a bad thing is the immune system sometimes being strong is detrimental to you because it will start killing normal tissues. So that's a very known thing is that when the immune system gets racketed up it will start attacking normal tissues because they think that there's bad viruses and bad bacteria in there. In the human brain is no exception. Over time your hyperactive immune response in the neural system will actually cause damage to neurons and other components that are needed in there. One of the beauties of fisetin is that it crosses the blood-brain barrier and it kind of slows down that immune response. And it specifically kind of prevents some of the immune response from causing damage to some of the neurons in your brain which leads to cognitive declines. 

So right away we already have two mechanisms. One, antioxidant that's already preventing cellular death. Two, we're getting in there and we're now stopping the immune response from attacking. The third one that also makes it unique is that it actually can cause differentiation of cells. Now, what do I mean by differentiation of cells? Is that your neural system has sometimes cells that are ready to become neurons, or ready to become certain other cells as certain cells die. 

Now what happens is when you're younger this is a very quick and fast process. As you cause any kind of damage, don't worry, new neurons get replaced, nuclea gets replaced. As you get older it becomes harder and harder to actually cause these immature cells from becoming mature. One of the things is that recent research has shown that fisetin is able to go in there and cause these cells to become these mature cells at a much higher, faster rate. What's actually occurring is that your brain sort of is becoming much more like a younger brain which is able to fight off the age-related decline. That's important.

I think those are the main mechanisms, if I talk at a molecular level, of what fisetin is doing in your brain to kind of prevent those age-related declines.