https://www.drangiemartinez.com/, https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c

Root-Cause Medicine, 8790 Ralston Road, Arvada, CO (2025)

12/08/2025

💣 WAIT—You’ve Been Lied to About Cholesterol and Your Brain.
It’s NOT coming from your food. Not even the healthy fats.

Here’s the real shocker:
Your brain builds its own cholesterol—behind a wall your cholesterol in your diet can’t cross (the blood-brain barrier).
This changes EVERYTHING about how we fight neuroinflammation, cognitive decline, and even how we read your labs.

As a clinician deep in Functional Medicine 3.0, this new data is flipping the old rules upside down.
➡️ Brain health is a system.
➡️ ApoE, not ApoB, runs the show.
➡️ Your labs aren’t telling the full story—yet.

Ready to dive into the next generation of brain diagnostics, neuro-longevity, and precision care?

Hit follow. We’re decoding the future of your brain—one data point at a time.

☎️ Interested in booking a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule a call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine

12/07/2025

At RootCause Medicine, we see healing like metamorphosis.

The body and brain can’t build what’s next
while still clinging to what’s breaking them down.

Whether it’s menopause, chronic inflammation, metabolic burnout,
or biotoxic stress—real change means releasing old patterns:
outdated physiology, stuck stress loops, and “normal-for-you” symptoms.
When those dissolve, your system can reorganize.

That’s why we use data to find what’s no longer serving you,
map the networks under pressure,
and build a precision plan that helps your biology do what it was designed to do:
adapt, regenerate, and become stronger than before.

☎️ Interested in booking a free a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule your call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

12/06/2025

Estrogen receptors aren’t just in ovaries - they’re everywhere in the brain.

So when estrogen declines, the symptoms show up in network-specific ways:
🧠 Hippocampus → memory + word finding
🎯 Prefrontal cortex → focus + brain fog
🔥 Hypothalamus/autonomics → hot flashes + sleep disruption
💛 Limbic system → mood + anxiety
⚡ Basal ganglia → drive + motivation

Menopause isn’t “in your head.”
It’s in your brain map.
And brain maps are measurable.

At RootCause, we take a different stand:
DATA → MAP → PRECISION PLAN

☎️ Interested in booking a free a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule your call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

12/06/2025

🧠Menopause brain health is a vital sign — and we treat it that way.

At RootCause, we follow a simple path:
DATA → MAP → PRECISION PLAN

DATA: we measure what’s driving cognition now
• symptoms + brain questionnaires
• hormone-brain signaling
• immune / inflammation load
• metabolism + mitochondria
• gut-brain drivers
• toxins + stress burden
• neuro-immune labs if needed

MAP: we identify which networks are stressed
• BBB / glial activation
• basal ganglia circuits
• cerebellar-autonomic rhythm
• limbic mood regulation
• frontal executive focus

RESULTS: targeted care changes the slope
✓ fewer fog days
✓ clearer mood + focus
✓ better sleep + autonomic stability
✓ trackable improvement over time
If your brain feels “not like you,” that’s data.
Let’s use it.

☎️ Interested in booking a free a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule your call.

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© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

12/05/2025

🧠When your brain feels crazy -
cognitive fog, post-viral fatigue, can’t think, mood upside down, not yourself -
that is not a character flaw.

It’s a pattern.
At RootCause, we don’t guess.
We use data precision to build a brain network map.
DATA. MAP. SOLVE.

Here’s how:
1) Symptoms → brain networks
Questionnaires show which circuits are struggling (mood, focus, memory, sensory load).
2) Risk factors → root-cause pathways
Post-viral load, mold/mercury biotoxicity, head trauma, chronic stress, autonomic strain.
3) Antibodies → functional regions
Panels like NeuroZoomer show where the immune system is signaling in the brain.

Examples of what we look for:
BBB / glial activation (astrocyte + microglia stress, barrier leak signals).
Basal ganglia targeting (post-infectious dopamine receptor patterns seen in PANS/PANDAS-spectrum cases).
Cerebellar immune patterns (cerebellum drives cognition, sensory rhythm, autonomic coordination — not just balance).
Endothelial/BBB autoimmunity flags like GRP78. (long covid)

When we overlay symptoms + risks + antibodies, the chaos becomes a map.
And once it’s mapped, it’s solvable.

This is how we get precision in the hardest cases:
POTS / dysautonomia • PANS • cognitive decline • head trauma • post-viral neuroinflammation • mold & mercury brain • the toxin called stress.
If your labs are “normal” but your brain is not…
you don’t need another guess.

You need a map.
At RootCause, we take a different stand:
DATA → MAP → PRECISION PLAN

☎️ Interested in booking a free a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule your call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

12/03/2025

🧠 Brain Longevity: Your Brain Makes—and Needs—Cholesterol
(And your diet has almost nothing to do with it)

Your brain runs its OWN cholesterol system.
It builds cholesterol from scratch
It uses it for memory, focus, and repair
It protects itself behind the blood-brain barrier

You can’t eat your way to better brain cholesterol.
Even the “healthiest fats” can’t cross that line.
So where does it come from?

👉 Specialized brain cells called astrocytes make it

And your brain?
Needs a lot to keep you sharp and aging well.

Brain cholesterol supports:
Nerve regeneration
Synaptic communication
Myelin sheath maintenance
Neuroprotection and longevity

You can influence this system.
✅ Supply the right building blocks (phospholipids, B vitamins, etc.)
✅ Understand your ApoE genotype—it controls brain cholesterol recycling

Do you know your ApoE status?
It’s one of the strongest predictors of brain aging and cognitive decline risk.
This is the future of brain health.

New tests are emerging to measure brain-specific cholesterol activity.
It’s the start of precision brain longevity care.

We’re in Functional Medicine 3.0:
Data-driven
Personalized
Neuroprotective

👉 Follow for next-gen brain diagnostics and smart aging strategies.
☎️ Interested in booking a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule a call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine

12/01/2025

💥 MIND BLOWN: Your Brain Runs on Cholesterol—But Not From Your Diet

Did you know your brain needs an enormous amount of cholesterol-but makes it all on its own?
That’s right: thanks to the blood-brain barrier, even the healthiest fats from your diet never make it into your brain. Instead, your brain relies on its own internal production using a completely different transport system (ApoE, not ApoB).

As a provider who works daily with neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration, and complex brain cases, this deepening knowledge continues to blow my mind. It shifts how we support brain repair, aging, and even how we interpret labs for precision longevity care.

We are no longer in Functional Medicine 1.0 or 2.0—
This is Functional Medicine 3.0: stacked, system-based, and personalized.

📈 Follow along as we unpack this new frontier in data-driven brain diagnostics, lipid metabolism, and personalized neuroprotection.

☎️ Interested in booking a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule a call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine

11/29/2025

🧠Hot topic: GLP-1s in an 80-year-old — not for “weight loss,” but for metabolic optimization and brain health.

An 80-year-old patient came in with:
intense food noise
insulin resistance
rising anxiety / mood dysregulation
and a strong desire to protect her independence and long-term cognition

We used a micro-dosed, highly monitored GLP-1 approach, because in older adults the goal is fat loss without muscle loss. Research is clear: GLP-1s can be powerful, but lean mass protection requires strategy (protein + resistance training + close tracking).

Her results so far:
10 lb weight loss
~4% body-fat reduction
muscle mass stable (and high for her age)
kidney function improved — which aligns with growing evidence that GLP-1s can support renal outcomes in higher-risk patients.
mood and anxiety improved
brain clarity/energy improved

Support plan alongside GLP-1:
high-protein diet
daily creatine
continued resistance training

This is what personalized prevention medicine looks like:
not chasing disease…
but targeting upstream risk, protecting muscle, and supporting the brain.
GLP-1s aren’t just metabolic tools. They act in appetite and reward circuits, which is why many patients report reduced food noise.

And there’s increasing evidence for neuroprotective / brain-health potential (still emerging, but promising).

Takeaway:
In the right patient, at the right dose, with the right muscle-protective plan, GLP-1s can be a longevity and brain-support tool — not just a scale tool.
Educational post only. GLP-1s aren’t for everyone; dosing and monitoring should always be individualized with a clinician, especially in older adults.

☎️ Interested in booking a free a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule your call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

11/29/2025

🥛10g is the new 5g/day

Newer creatine research is pushing beyond the old “5g/day for muscles” mindset.

Newer data is now encouraging a goal toward ~10g/day as a practical target for many adults—especially for brain energy, cognitive resilience, an
d healthy aging, on top of the well-known muscle and strength benefits.

This is important because the brain is a high-energy organ, and creatine helps buffer ATP (cellular energy). Studies show cognitive benefits are most noticeable when brain energy is stressed (aging, sleep loss, high demand, low creatine diets), and higher daily intakes can be more effective for saturating brain stores than 5g alone.

Creatine’s benefit list keeps growing: muscle preservation, strength/power, recovery, metabolic support, and increasingly, attention/memory and brain endurance.

The challenge is- 10g is hard to remember or tolerate all at once, so here’s my simple “most days” routine:
AM: 5g Thorne creatine in a warm drink to start the day
PM: 5g Lemonade creatine in the afternoon

Easy. Consistent. Brain + muscle supported without overthinking it.
(As always: check with your clinician if you have kidney disease or are pregnant/breastfeeding; most healthy adults do great with creatine, but dosing should fit the person.)

☎️ Interested in booking a free a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule your call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

11/28/2025

🚨I received LabCorp’s standard annual compliance notice.

It’s a routine reminder that clinicians should only order labs that are medically necessary for each patient, and that “customized/personalized” panels can be denied by payers or flagged if they’re viewed as unnecessary.

This letter was different this year in that they added a 3rd statement that I could be fined for ordering these lab!

Here’s the deeper issue: our system defines “medical necessity” as care that finds disease (very late!) - not care that prevents it earlier-when it matters.

That means advanced prevention labs (like fractionated/NMR cholesterol particle testing) are often labeled “non-covered,” even when they detect risk years before standard panels do.

So the same prevention test can look like this:
Insurance route: “non-covered/customized” → higher patient responsibility/possibly $200+
Cash route: often dramatically cheaper- more on the order of $40+
Result: patients are discouraged from getting early, risk-detecting data.
This isn’t about labs being “extra.”

It’s about a broken healthcare model built for 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲, not 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆.

That’s the politics of prevention.

☎️ Interested in booking a free a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule your call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

11/27/2025

I'm An Early Adopter of New Health Gadgets

See which items have made the cut... and where to get them during Black Friday sales!

At RootCause, we don’t guess — we measure and personalize with a stacked precision toolkit:

PNOĒ metabolic testing (true VO₂ + fuel-burning data), InBody, CGMs, Nitric Oxide + ketone testing
Advanced functional lab testing to find true root causes
Peptide protocols
Advanced bioidentical hormone optimization for longevity + quality of life

Health is a compounding investment of sophisticated tools!

11/22/2025

🔥 Creatine Made Simple

Most people do best with creatine monohydrate, but here are the key points to keep it simple:
• Monohydrate = most researched + most effective
• Can get clumpy or cause mild GI discomfort at higher doses
• Mix in a hot drink or take smaller doses for easier dissolving
• Micronized monohydrate = smoother texture, easier on the stomach
• Creatine HCl can feel gentler for sensitive guts, but not more effective
• Choose the form your body tolerates so you can stay consistent

☎️ Interested in booking a free a Discovery Call with Dr. Angie? Visit https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c to schedule your call.

© Copyright 2025 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

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