Try This – 3 Shares For Your Week

Today I’m sharing three things that really caught my attention this week. 

1. This powerful biomarker could help you prevent dementia

2. Astounding breakthroughs in cancer treatment this week

3. How Finnish researchers are supporting children’s microbiomes

Let’s get into it.

Number 1: Your Brain Has a Night-Shift Cleaning Crew, and Your Wearable May Be Watching It

Why do chronic stress, depression, heart disease, and poor sleep all seem to increase the risk of dementia?

According to a recent review in Science, they may have something important in common: They can all interfere with your brain's nightly cleanup process.

Researchers are increasingly focused on the brain's glymphatic system, a network that becomes most active during deep sleep. Think of it as your brain's sanitation crew. While you sleep, it helps clear away metabolic waste, including amyloid-beta and tau, the proteins that accumulate in Alzheimer's disease.

When sleep is short, fragmented, or of poor quality, that cleanup process may become less efficient. Over time, waste products can build up, potentially contributing to neurodegeneration.

Here's the real punchline, and the part I found most useful: The authors argue that one of the best at-home proxies for how well this system is running is something your wearable (Apple Watch, Whoop, or Oura Ring) may already be tracking—your heart rate variability (HRV).

Why HRV? Your autonomic nervous system orchestrates the deep, restorative sleep that powers glymphatic clearance, the exact thing HRV measures. A higher, healthier overnight HRV tends to reflect the calm, parasympathetic-dominant state your brain needs to do its housekeeping. A consistently suppressed one can be a sign that this state isn't happening. 

So your nightly HRV trend may be a cheap, noninvasive window into whether your brain's detox crew is actually clocking in and, the paper suggests, into your long-term risk for chronic disease, especially dementia.

Also, there’s more good news: You can work on improving your HRV. Check out my episode with Dr. Jay Wiles, which is all about this topic.

Number 2: Big Progress in the World of Pancreatic Cancer

Here’s some pretty awesome news when it comes to the deadliest form of cancer: pancreatic cancer. 

This devastating disease has a five-year survival rate stuck at just 13 percent, and this year, an estimated 52,740 Americans are expected to die from it. If you've followed this disease for any length of time, you know we almost never get results worth celebrating.

Well, that just changed. Researchers just published a phase-three trial in The New England Journal of Medicine testing a new targeted oral drug, called daraxonrasib, in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer whose disease had already progressed after prior treatment (which is brutally common). 

The result: Patients on the new drug lived a median of 13.2 months, versus 6.7 months on standard chemotherapy. Let that sink in. For one of the deadliest cancers we know of, this essentially doubled survival.

My friend Dr. Joseph Zundell broke this down beautifully in a video, and his framing stuck with me. A survival number like that isn't just an abstraction on a chart. In real life, it becomes another birthday, another anniversary, more time with kids and grandkids. More than 90 percent of pancreatic tumors are driven by RAS-pathway mutations, a target scientists spent decades calling "undruggable." Now we finally have hard evidence that hitting that biology head-on can change outcomes.

Additionally, an immunotherapy called Anktiva is being tested in pancreatic cancer from a totally different angle. Instead of attacking the tumor directly, it rebuilds the patient's own immune defenses, ramping up the NK and T cells that cancer and chemo tend to wipe out.

The data is earlier-stage and mostly from combination trials, so keep the hype in check, but it's promising enough that the FDA gave it a fast-track Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation in pancreatic cancer. And patients who rebuilt their immune counts have shown meaningfully longer survival, including one remarkable case still in remission more than six years out.

Cancer is brutally multifactorial, which is exactly why I've watched even very healthy people get blindsided by it, and you don't beat something that complex with a single magic bullet. So having multiple shots on goal at once—such as targeted pills like daraxonrasib and smarter immunotherapies like Anktiva—is exactly the kind of progress we need. And we need every good option we can get.

Number 3: Let Kids Play in Dirt—Their Immune System Depends on It! 

This is a fun share that I came across on X about Finnish researchers who transformed urban daycare playgrounds by covering the gravel with real forest soil, grass, and natural vegetation. 

The kids dug in it, climbed on it, and got dirty. That's it. Just 28 days later, the researchers saw changes they didn't expect to happen so quickly.

The children exposed to the forest environment developed more diverse bacteria on their skin and in their gut (microbes that help train and regulate the immune system).

Their blood also showed increases in regulatory immune cells, the cells responsible for teaching the body not to overreact to harmless triggers like pollen, dust, or certain foods. And their markers of inflammation dropped as well.

The children who continued playing on standard gravel playgrounds showed none of these changes.

Why does this matter? Rates of allergies, asthma, and autoimmune conditions have risen dramatically over the past few decades. Some scientists believe part of the reason is that modern life has disconnected us from the microbes humans evolved alongside. Many children now spend surprisingly little time outdoors, and even less time interacting with soil, plants, and natural environments.

The takeaway: Spending more time in nature isn't just good for your mental health. Gardening, hiking, playing in the dirt with your kids, or simply spending time in green spaces may expose you to beneficial microbes that help support a healthier, more resilient immune system. Sometimes the simplest health interventions are the ones we've been doing for thousands of years.

I hope that one day, American daycares will follow suit after seeing this research. One can dream! 

See you next week. 

Much love,
Dhru Purohit 

The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice; please consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any health-related decisions.