Clinical Professor, Department of Neurology, University of California Los Angeles; PADRECC Director, West Los Angeles Veterans Association, Los Angeles, CaliforniaAli Saad, MD
It was a yearlong fellowship. I stayed on as affiliate faculty. I'm the first neurologist to have done it. My focus has been food systems' role between climate and health.Yes, I finished my residency in 2013, and then I finished my stroke fellowship in 2014. It was almost 10 years before I started the climate fellowship.Environmentalism has always been a personal interest of mine, divorced from medicine.
My takeaways are, number one, the things that are bad for the planet are also bad for our health, and more specifically, our brain health. The mechanisms by which those happen, at least for which we have the largest amount of evidence for, are heat and air pollution. They contribute significantly to neurologic morbidity, at least according to data; they quote that 20% of global stroke risk can be attributed to air pollution, which seems like a crazy number.
I think something that is much more palatable to people and seems to have a more direct relation to health, without having to get into the mechanisms of climate and health, is promoting healthy diets for people. Promoting healthy diets is not something that is political; it's not controversial; it's not something that any doctor or any neurologist is going to say,"Well, that's not important.
These are really easy things that we can implement with our patients that don't require any added cost. It's just an alert. Often, with patients with neurodegenerative disease, we might talk to their family members who accompany them to their clinic visits.