The First Effective Treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease. Maybe.

Listening to  Dale Bredesen, UCLA "Reducing the Global Burden of Dementia: The First Effective Treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease" on what we know about Alzheimer and how to treat it:

CommonwealthClub.org/events/archive/podcast/reducing-global-burden-dementia-first-effective-treatment-alzheimers-disease

A very charismatic speaker, he advocates for a very broad-front approach to early testing, and intricate individually tailored treatment regimen.

A few tidbits from his talk: Saturation of oxygen at night is very important (get an oximeter, stick it on your finger at home, measure).  Mouth herpes has a strong correlation with dementia. Diet is crucial. Exercise. Sleep. Reduce stress. Gluten is not good for most people.

I am not aware of anyone in my biological family having had Alzheimer (or, any form of dementia), but it hits close to home - not only do I know of friends' parents suffering, but also Benny Lautrup,



a close friend since 1973, is in Alzheimer decline, and is very brave and outspoken about it. Rasmus Friis wrote about his life with Alzheimer in Farvel til viden, a very thoughtful and sensitive interview.

Bredesen speaks Californian (he's even a CalTech undergrad), and sounds too good to be true, so for balance I Googled for a skeptical assessment. In Hope and Hype for Alzheimer’s,  Harriet A. Hall (2018) writes:

The Bredesen Protocol is a personalized, comprehensive therapeutic program involving multiple modalities designed to achieve metabolic enhancement for neurodegeneration. Bredesen has published a report of ten patients, with three case studies and a summary table that merely lists the other seven patients. Only half of them were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; the others had mild cognitive impairment or subjective cognitive impairment. The case studies describe a complicated individual regimen. For example, one case was treated with fasting, a limited, mostly vegetarian diet, probiotics, coconut oil, strenuous exercise (swimming, cycling, running), melatonin, numerous herbs and vitamins, DHA and EPA. Nine patients had “subjective or objective improvement;” the tenth had advanced Alzheimer’s and failed to improve. He now claims to have treated 100 patients. The treatments are based loosely on his hypotheses about causation, with no clear rationale for the combination of interventions.

Bredesen thinks the amyloid deposits that characterize the disease are not the problem, but rather a protectant that kills microbes and fungi and protects from inflammation like from sugar. And he believes chronic Lyme disease (which doesn’t exist) is a critical factor.

His method looks at over 100 parameters: copper to zinc ratio, estradiol to progesterone ratio, vitamin D status, stress level, HSCRP, IL6, TNF alpha, etc. He says, “Most people don’t do well with gluten,” and says everyone should fast 12–16 hours at night to clean out the brain.

It's such a huge issue for all of us that it is hard to know where to turn - there are so many voices - but it seems we are not out of the woods yet. So far all FDA approved drugs that are meant to decrease the amyloid deposits have had no effect. Not aware of anything else on horizon, but then again, I am no neurologist.