Now there are lots of ways to prevent dementia and Alzheimer's....
Today's Post: Tuesday, 9-8-2009
A recent headlined story about disease trends in Australia suggests that treating and managing dementia and Alzheimer's disease may become the largest medical care cost they have.
Due to the aging demographics of the Baby Boomers in the United States, we might be in even worse trouble.
This is literally a triple threat problem.
Medical care costs are already too high. So we could really do without another large boost in them that this would cause.
In the early stages, people with these diseases can forget thing or make errors that, in some occupations, can cause multiple injuries or deaths, or lost data. We could really do without that also.
And, people in later stages of these diseases, many of whom would have remained productively employed otherwise, no longer will be. So not only will medical care costs go up, there will be less people earning the money to pay them!! We had better avoid that one!
That's the really scary news.
But, the good news is that all this is between 80 & 99 % preventable.
1. First, practicing a healthy lifestyle by itself cuts the incidence of these diseases.
Reuters Health last Thursday, 9-3 had a story reporting on a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
They listed smoking, never exercising, eating few if any vegetables or fruit each day, and, interestingly enough, NOT drinking any alcohol as unhealthy behaviors (& I hope drinking heavily was looked at too).
Of the 5123 adults in the study that looked at a 17 year time period, when they compared the group that had the most parts of a healthy lifestyle with the group having the worst lifestyle doing most of these things wrong, the people who best followed a healthy lifestyle in these ways had a third of the chances of getting "cognitive deficit"s.
The article pointed out that each of the components had shown before to have the ability to cause or prevent these kinds of problems. This study shows that this single method, doing each of the 4 health practices together, eliminated virtually two thirds of the risk of mental decline.
Since exercise literally grows new brain and nerve cells, keeps your heart and blood vessels and circulation healthy and lowers inflammation, it's hardly surprising that regular exercise helps. Regular exercise also helps prevent or minimize obesity including the unseen fat that tends to cause disease.
Eating vegetables and fruit tends to provide antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients and also helps prevent or minimize obesity including the unseen fat that tends to cause disease. Nonstarchy vegetables can even help reverse obesity if you eat them abundantly every day.
Smoking actively harms circulation to the brain and increases the rate at which people age.
Moderate drinking, particularly of red wine, as practiced in the Mediterranean diet, increases HDL, reduces stress, and if done with social interaction, can even stimulate the brain.
2. Second, we now know there are now a very large number of things you can take that either prevent Alzheimer's or actually can reverse it in the early stages.
Taking 2,000 iu or more a day of vitamin D3 and 600 mg a day or so of turmeric or its active ingredient, curcumin, apparently normalizes and activates your macrophages in your immune system to gobble up and get rid of the amyloid plaques that are one of the causes of Alzheimer's disease.
Vitamin D3 also tends to prevent your macrophages and the rest of your immune system from attacking your nerves as it is on record as tending to prevent multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases.
And, in research described in the current issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology that is dated today, September 8, 2009, it has been found that inflammation and the resulting increase in a compound called tumor necrosis factor made any existing mental decline irreversibly worse. Since turmeric also is a superb anti-inflammatory, this also makes it valuable to help prevent Alzheimer's disease and other mental decline by reducing excessive inflammation.
Not only does the omega 3 fatty acid DHA help prevent inflammation, it seems to particularly benefit your nerves and brain. Pregnant women who take 100 mg a day or more have children who are mentally sharper and test out to be smarter than the kids of women who don't. And, one source I read said that people who take that much DHA are also 30 % less likely to get mental decline.
PS, the abbreviated acronym for phosphatidyl serine, apparently acts to ensure that the cell membranes of your brain cells stay pliable and able to uptake and get rid of the things that they should enough that people who take 100 mg a day of PS are also 20 % less likely to get mental decline. And, people over 50 who take that much score significantly higher in tests of memory, name recall, learning and concentration.
People who take 1,000 mcg of B12, 800 mcg of folic acid, and 50 mg but not over 100 mg of B6 and who don't smoke tend to keep their homocysteine level under 9.0 (Taking TMG & NAC supplements can help lower homocysteine for people that the B vitamins don't quite get that low a reading for their homocysteine.) Studies have found that people who have homocysteine levels well over 9.0 tend to get far more dementia than people below that level.
And, no surprise, the other aspects of a healthy lifestyle tend to keep homocysteine levels low.
Lastly, caffeine helps prevent mental decline. In addition, the coffee, tea, and green tea that are the best and most healthful sources of it have significantly high levels of antioxidants.
In fact, one study reported by Dr Al Sears in a recent issue of the health email TotalHealthBreakthroughs found that in mice that were actually bred to develop Alzheimer's. two months of drinking water with 500 mg of caffeine added caused them to perform much better on memory and thinking tests than mice who didn't get the caffeine in their water.
The memories of the mice who got the caffeine were as good as the with mice that had no dementia at all.
Why? In part because the mice taking getting the caffeine had a 50% reduction of beta amyloid, the protein we find as a likely causative agent for Alzheimer's disease.
3. Third, because both age related mental decline and Alzheimer's disease are often triggered by high blood sugar or poor circulation or both, everything that helps keep your blood sugar levels in the desirable range and everything that helps keep your heart healthy also helps prevent all the kinds of mental decline.
Such things as taking 600 mg a day of niacin by taking 300 mg right after breakfast and 300 right after lunch; NOT ingesting any partially hydrogenated oils, virtually never drinking soft drinks or eating refined grain foods; eating far less than the average amount of sugar, and always getting regular exercise plus eating a Mediterranean diet including some red wine -- all help to do this.
4. Fourth, doing everything you can to avoid ingesting too much mercury or having it build up in your blood and brain is important.
One way to do this is to avoid eating some kinds of fish at all. Swordfish & king mackerel and other quite large predatory fish have too much mercury for it to be wise to eat any. Tuna has less but eating tuna a few times some months is far safer than eating it several times every week.
Mercifully, so far, wild caught salmon, sardines, regular sized and wild caught mackerel and some other wild caught fish have very little mercury. And purified fish oil has none that I'm aware of.
There is one kind of gene that is known to make Alzheimer's disease more likely. In one of his patients with this gene, Dr Mark Hyman found that this gene may make it easier to build up mercury in the blood and found he was able to reverse the man's mental decline in large part by removing mercury sources from his diet and treating him to remove the mercury he that found tested high initially in his patient's blood stream. Dr Hyman also did other things to improve that man's health practices that would be helpful; but removing the high mercury level was clearly one of the most effective things he did.
5. Fifth, your brain is very like a muscle. If you use it a lot, it gets stronger and less prone to disease. In fact, we now know that the number of interconnections and strength of patterns of thought in people who use their brains a lot enable them to keep working well enough to function normally -- even in people who actually have significant amounts of amyloid plaque in their brains!
Since people grow up doing it and find it easy, it's only recently been discovered that one of the most effective brain exercises on the planet is frequently conversing with other people. In fact, people with good social networks who converse with people often -- tend to be much less likely to experience mental decline as a result.
Similarly, people who speak two or more languages have enough more brain development that they are much less likely to get Alzheimer's disease.
So are people who read a lot and continually learn new things. (That includes YOU or you wouldn't be reading this!)
So, if you do all these things, your chances of getting Alzheimer's disease or age related mental decline drop to near zero.
Today's Post: Tuesday, 9-8-2009
A recent headlined story about disease trends in Australia suggests that treating and managing dementia and Alzheimer's disease may become the largest medical care cost they have.
Due to the aging demographics of the Baby Boomers in the United States, we might be in even worse trouble.
This is literally a triple threat problem.
Medical care costs are already too high. So we could really do without another large boost in them that this would cause.
In the early stages, people with these diseases can forget thing or make errors that, in some occupations, can cause multiple injuries or deaths, or lost data. We could really do without that also.
And, people in later stages of these diseases, many of whom would have remained productively employed otherwise, no longer will be. So not only will medical care costs go up, there will be less people earning the money to pay them!! We had better avoid that one!
That's the really scary news.
But, the good news is that all this is between 80 & 99 % preventable.
1. First, practicing a healthy lifestyle by itself cuts the incidence of these diseases.
Reuters Health last Thursday, 9-3 had a story reporting on a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
They listed smoking, never exercising, eating few if any vegetables or fruit each day, and, interestingly enough, NOT drinking any alcohol as unhealthy behaviors (& I hope drinking heavily was looked at too).
Of the 5123 adults in the study that looked at a 17 year time period, when they compared the group that had the most parts of a healthy lifestyle with the group having the worst lifestyle doing most of these things wrong, the people who best followed a healthy lifestyle in these ways had a third of the chances of getting "cognitive deficit"s.
The article pointed out that each of the components had shown before to have the ability to cause or prevent these kinds of problems. This study shows that this single method, doing each of the 4 health practices together, eliminated virtually two thirds of the risk of mental decline.
Since exercise literally grows new brain and nerve cells, keeps your heart and blood vessels and circulation healthy and lowers inflammation, it's hardly surprising that regular exercise helps. Regular exercise also helps prevent or minimize obesity including the unseen fat that tends to cause disease.
Eating vegetables and fruit tends to provide antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients and also helps prevent or minimize obesity including the unseen fat that tends to cause disease. Nonstarchy vegetables can even help reverse obesity if you eat them abundantly every day.
Smoking actively harms circulation to the brain and increases the rate at which people age.
Moderate drinking, particularly of red wine, as practiced in the Mediterranean diet, increases HDL, reduces stress, and if done with social interaction, can even stimulate the brain.
2. Second, we now know there are now a very large number of things you can take that either prevent Alzheimer's or actually can reverse it in the early stages.
Taking 2,000 iu or more a day of vitamin D3 and 600 mg a day or so of turmeric or its active ingredient, curcumin, apparently normalizes and activates your macrophages in your immune system to gobble up and get rid of the amyloid plaques that are one of the causes of Alzheimer's disease.
Vitamin D3 also tends to prevent your macrophages and the rest of your immune system from attacking your nerves as it is on record as tending to prevent multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases.
And, in research described in the current issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology that is dated today, September 8, 2009, it has been found that inflammation and the resulting increase in a compound called tumor necrosis factor made any existing mental decline irreversibly worse. Since turmeric also is a superb anti-inflammatory, this also makes it valuable to help prevent Alzheimer's disease and other mental decline by reducing excessive inflammation.
Not only does the omega 3 fatty acid DHA help prevent inflammation, it seems to particularly benefit your nerves and brain. Pregnant women who take 100 mg a day or more have children who are mentally sharper and test out to be smarter than the kids of women who don't. And, one source I read said that people who take that much DHA are also 30 % less likely to get mental decline.
PS, the abbreviated acronym for phosphatidyl serine, apparently acts to ensure that the cell membranes of your brain cells stay pliable and able to uptake and get rid of the things that they should enough that people who take 100 mg a day of PS are also 20 % less likely to get mental decline. And, people over 50 who take that much score significantly higher in tests of memory, name recall, learning and concentration.
People who take 1,000 mcg of B12, 800 mcg of folic acid, and 50 mg but not over 100 mg of B6 and who don't smoke tend to keep their homocysteine level under 9.0 (Taking TMG & NAC supplements can help lower homocysteine for people that the B vitamins don't quite get that low a reading for their homocysteine.) Studies have found that people who have homocysteine levels well over 9.0 tend to get far more dementia than people below that level.
And, no surprise, the other aspects of a healthy lifestyle tend to keep homocysteine levels low.
Lastly, caffeine helps prevent mental decline. In addition, the coffee, tea, and green tea that are the best and most healthful sources of it have significantly high levels of antioxidants.
In fact, one study reported by Dr Al Sears in a recent issue of the health email TotalHealthBreakthroughs found that in mice that were actually bred to develop Alzheimer's. two months of drinking water with 500 mg of caffeine added caused them to perform much better on memory and thinking tests than mice who didn't get the caffeine in their water.
The memories of the mice who got the caffeine were as good as the with mice that had no dementia at all.
Why? In part because the mice taking getting the caffeine had a 50% reduction of beta amyloid, the protein we find as a likely causative agent for Alzheimer's disease.
3. Third, because both age related mental decline and Alzheimer's disease are often triggered by high blood sugar or poor circulation or both, everything that helps keep your blood sugar levels in the desirable range and everything that helps keep your heart healthy also helps prevent all the kinds of mental decline.
Such things as taking 600 mg a day of niacin by taking 300 mg right after breakfast and 300 right after lunch; NOT ingesting any partially hydrogenated oils, virtually never drinking soft drinks or eating refined grain foods; eating far less than the average amount of sugar, and always getting regular exercise plus eating a Mediterranean diet including some red wine -- all help to do this.
4. Fourth, doing everything you can to avoid ingesting too much mercury or having it build up in your blood and brain is important.
One way to do this is to avoid eating some kinds of fish at all. Swordfish & king mackerel and other quite large predatory fish have too much mercury for it to be wise to eat any. Tuna has less but eating tuna a few times some months is far safer than eating it several times every week.
Mercifully, so far, wild caught salmon, sardines, regular sized and wild caught mackerel and some other wild caught fish have very little mercury. And purified fish oil has none that I'm aware of.
There is one kind of gene that is known to make Alzheimer's disease more likely. In one of his patients with this gene, Dr Mark Hyman found that this gene may make it easier to build up mercury in the blood and found he was able to reverse the man's mental decline in large part by removing mercury sources from his diet and treating him to remove the mercury he that found tested high initially in his patient's blood stream. Dr Hyman also did other things to improve that man's health practices that would be helpful; but removing the high mercury level was clearly one of the most effective things he did.
5. Fifth, your brain is very like a muscle. If you use it a lot, it gets stronger and less prone to disease. In fact, we now know that the number of interconnections and strength of patterns of thought in people who use their brains a lot enable them to keep working well enough to function normally -- even in people who actually have significant amounts of amyloid plaque in their brains!
Since people grow up doing it and find it easy, it's only recently been discovered that one of the most effective brain exercises on the planet is frequently conversing with other people. In fact, people with good social networks who converse with people often -- tend to be much less likely to experience mental decline as a result.
Similarly, people who speak two or more languages have enough more brain development that they are much less likely to get Alzheimer's disease.
So are people who read a lot and continually learn new things. (That includes YOU or you wouldn't be reading this!)
So, if you do all these things, your chances of getting Alzheimer's disease or age related mental decline drop to near zero.
Labels: important way to prevent more increases in health care costs, prevent Alzheimer's disease, prevent mental decline, prevent senility, protect your brain, supplements that prevent Alzheimer's disease
posted by David at 2:21 PM
2 Comments:
Dr Dharma Singh Khalsa's The Healing Minute email yesterday,
9-9, reported on new research in the journal Neurology that found that even people as young as
45 who have high blood pressure are more likely to have problems with their memory & thinking skills.
Interestingly, the second or bottom number, the diastolic pressure, research finds is more important than the systolic pressure or first listed reading. Desirable blood pressure is 119 orver 79 or slightly less.
In fact for every 10 % increase in the diastolic reading above 80 the odds of cognitive problems go up by 7 %.
So if you keep yourself from being too fat, exercise, and otherwise protect your heart AND do extra things to lower your blood pressure if the diastolic or second number is much over 90, you'll also be less likely to get any kind of mental decline.
See Lower high blood pressure without drug side effects....The post in this blog for Tuesday, 8-18-2009 for more info.
Also, I just learned today that Dr Mark Hyman posted yesterday, 9-9 I think, on why mercury is becoming more of a problem that can harm your brain and some ideas on how to find out if you have too much at:
http://www.ultrawellnes.com/blog .
And, he says his next post will have some ideas on how to get rid of it if you have too much in your body. (I have read that taking 500 mg a day of the supplement NAC is one way to do that in addition to NAC's effect on lowering homocysteine.)
That 5th way is significant. It seems that the association net in your brain operates much like the internet.
If you add enough circuits that interconnect them in enough ways, even if big chunks of your brain's association net are lost, signals and connections that are blocked by that damage arrive just fine anyway by rerouting through the undamaged part of the network -- just like the way the internet operates.
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