New leverage to prevent Alzheimer's disease Five.....

Today's post:  Tuesday, 4-25-2017

The first four of the posts in this series has enough different kinds of effective techniques to reduce the risk of getting Alzheimer’s to cut the risk to near zero even for people who live to be older than 70 or even 85 years old.

Of course that’s for people who do all of them or very close to all of them.

But by beginning with cutting the overall risk in half and relentlessly removing the remaining risks with things proven by research to work for each one, this seems quite likely!

This is in stark contrast to the myth now repeated by many doctors because it’s what they have been told that they take on faith that it isn’t possible to prevent Alzheimer’s.

In the first four parts of this series, we’ve shown that many kinds of research show the exact opposite.

Of course, for people who are doing everything wrong now to switch to such an opposite lifestyle in so many ways and keep track to ensure they keep doing it all may seem impossible.

But since these same actions clearly work and also prevent cancers and heart disease and strokes and diabetes and can help people lose excess fat they keep off, the rewards make it worthwhile well before people live an Alzheimer’s free live too.

But what about people who are in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s?

Are there ways to rescue some of these people now and then gradually restore some of them to health?

There might be! – That’s because some methods DO show large enough effects in such people that if they were all used with some of the appropriate methods from the first four posts, we can clearly save some of these people.

Will that turn out to be 10 % of them or 90% of them?  That may vary depending on how severe the damage is and how far along it is and the variation between people.

But if we can save 90% of the people who have been placed in an Alzheimer’s assisted living because they can no longer feed themselves or recognize close relatives to 10% of those who would not otherwise live longer than a week, it would clearly be worth doing.

There are two things that have reversed Alzheimer’s in people at the first part of this spectrum.

1.  People who have been given MCT oil a few times a day for a few weeks who were in the first group have recovered. 

This is apparently because the ability of the brain and its component and connecting nerves to use glucose has been dramatically reduced or almost eliminated in these people.  BUT your brain can also run on ketones from processing MCT oils.  So the person’s brain has been like a car engine with no gas or electricity to fuel it.  No wonder it has little function.  But this is a way that often restores a fuel source the brain can use and it often fires back up.  That then gives you a way to use the methods in the first four posts to further reduce the damage and prevent it from returning.

Note that MCT oil has several fractions.  Some taste worse than rancid food fat or car grease.  Some are bland and almost tasteless.  Some feed the brain in this way quite well.  And some hardly do so at all.

An entrepreneur called Dave Asprey found that two fractions fit the desirable combination:  They taste bland AND they power the brain well.  He sells it as “Brain Octane.” 

So that likely is the best MCT oil to use.

2.  Somehow a man in the first group was given a supplement that contained an extract of the Lion’s Mane mushroom a few times a day.  He’d been unable to eat unassisted and rarely got out of bed.  Within a week he was getting up and helping to care for and talk to the other patients.

Since then research has verified that Lion’s Mane extract does grow new brain cells!  The only downside is that to keep the gains, you either have to keep taking it or you have to add a lot of things that produce more permanent new brain and nerve cell growth before you discontinue it.

3.  An Australian group tested a method to use electrical stimulation to remove beta amyloid plaques that was reported to remove something like 70% of them. 

That’s significant for two reasons.  Many of the people who had this treatment recovered memories and mental abilities. 

Secondly, people without Alzheimer’s reduced functions have some beta amyloid.  But Alzheimer’s occurs when there begins to be more than the normal clean up functions can remove, so it builds up until it causes damage.  And this method removes so much beta amyloid there is a small enough amount that it no longer builds up or is at a damaging level.

I recently saw a more detailed report of this research.  Instead of removing the beta amyloid directly, it enables the immune system to remove it.

And, that likely means that adding 10,000 iu a day or more vitamin D3 and enough curcumin from turmeric and turmeric to this treatment would clear far more beta amyloid because they each boost the immune system’s ability to do this.

4.   I’ve lost track of the research report.  But when the ability to store short term memories or access long term memories is lost because the link of the main part of the brain to the hippocampus that does these functions no longer works, so are those abilities for the whole person.

Some researchers realized that electrical stimulation couldn’t re-connect this broken link directly because it didn’t go deep enough to do the job.

So they focused their stimulation on an area just close enough to the hippocampus and closer to the skull that they thought it might initiate a repair process that would restore the entire link better than just the stimulation alone.

It worked!

So, as you can see, using the first two methods here may be enough to begin to reverse more severe Alzheimer’s damage if it is short of very severe.

And, adding to that the second two and then adding more methods when a recovery does begin, we may save over 10% of even very late stage Alzheimer’s patients.