Memory Loss From Alzheimer’s Reversed For First Time With New Approach
Nine out of ten patients with memory problems showed improvements with this novel multi-systems approach
Memory loss in patients with Alzheimer’s disease may be reversed — and the improvement sustained — using a novel treatment approach, a small exploratory study has found.
The study, which included 10 patients, used a combination of therapies which were personalised to help them reverse memory loss (Bredesen, 2014).
Some patients were getting disoriented while driving, others mixing up names and some had been forced to quit their jobs.
Within three to six months of the treatment all but one of the patients was seeing either objective or subjective improvements in their memory.
Those who had been forced to quit work were able to return.
One of the patients was a 55-year-old attorney who had been suffering memory loss for four years, but showed a remarkable improvement from the program:
“After five months on the therapeutic program, she noted that she no longer needed her iPad for notes, and no longer needed to record conversations.
She was able to work once again, was able to learn Spanish, and began to learn a new legal specialty.
Her children noted that she no longer became lost in mid-sentence, no longer thought she had asked them to do something that she had not asked, and answered their questions with normal rapidity and memory.”
Professor Dale Bredesen, who authored the study, explained that the key is taking a multi-systems approach: “The existing Alzheimer’s drugs affect a single target, but Alzheimer’s disease is more complex.
Imagine having a roof with 36 holes in it, and your drug patched one hole very well — the drug may have worked, a single “hole” may have been fixed, but you still have 35 other leaks, and so the underlying process may not be affected much.”
Each patient was given a specialised program, which often included things like exercise, optimising sleep, practising yoga, brain stimulation and taking supplements such as vitamin D3 and melatonin.
In total Professor Bredesen’s therapeutic plan has 36-points, the exact combination of which was tailored for each patient.
As he is the first to say, though, the study is only a small one:
“This is the first successful demonstration.
The current, anecdotal results require a larger trial, not only to confirm or refute the results reported here, but also to address key questions raised, such as the degree of improvement that can be achieved routinely, how late in the course of cognitive decline reversal can be effected, whether such an approach may be effective in patients with familial Alzheimer’s disease, and last, how long improvement can be sustained.”
Still, even though the study is small, the results are striking — and hopeful.
Wow, Mary. This sounds very hopeful. My DH has familial Alzheimers and I know that his daughter is terrified she may carry the disease. Although the study is small and is not known to affect the familial Alzheimers, it may give her something positive to hang onto - and his therapies sound like something that all of us may benefit from. Thanks for sending.
This all reads like good healthy living, and something practiced naturally by previous generations. They just called it by different names. For instance, meditation = prayer. Exercise = working the land. Highly processed foods were not available and you ate what you could grow or barter for.
And I try to live this way too, as much as I can. It was how I was raised. But as a caregiver, I can't seem to get 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night, and some of the items (like hormone therapy) are out of the question for me.
A study of only 10 patients is not large enough to show any statistical significance, but the results indicate that the study is worth expanding to a large number so that statistical significance can be achieved. Anything that can help improve memory is good.
But living this way did not keep my father from developing Lewy Body Disease.
The question rema are these people ones who had other conditions ruled out as causing the memory problems? Many of the things to do can be caused by conditions other than Alzheimer's.
Here is an example of the blind spot about AD which I have talked about and have not read anywhere. People with AD are having their synapses plaqued over. THE DISEASE DOES NOT PREVENT THE FORMATION OF NEW ONES. By getting formalized ways to help speed up new learning the mind will connect the new events with the old associated ones. At least until the central synapses are glommed over with plaque too much to attach new connections. I can fly a planet through this medieval blind spot.
Alzheimers does not stop the mind from learning. It plaques over existing 'learning' randomly depending on how it spreads in the brain but it has no other ability.
Besides the odds of getting AD are quite small. According to alz.org there are 5 million people with AD out of some 180 million over 50 in the USA. That equates to a 1 in 36 chance of having the disease. The odds go up later in life but usually getting it much later means it also moves slower and since only 1 in 19 lives to the age of ninety, something else is going to get us before AD.
On the upside, people living past 90 has almost tripled since 1980 and is expected to double again in the next 40 years. Let's face it no matter how much we worry, people are stinking up the joint longer and longer.
Look up the average life expectancy in 1960. Most people didn't make it to 65. When Canada introduced the national pension plan the average person would have collected for 4 years. Now it's over 20.
I believe good habits and other steps taken are fine but the two healthiest people I knew are dead. Ross McMullin who was Dianne's friend and became the CEO of Adidas died at 44 from cancer. No smoking, no drinking, jogging, gym rat, ridiculously healthy diet, and a sensible outlook. Didn't help him. I have a friend who doesn't eat vegetables or fruit or hardly any starch. Meat, meat, meat, overweight by miles, no exercise, smokes, and drinks like a fish. He's 68 now and is still working in a demanding job (his wife who was a gym rat and ate healthy died earlier this year from cancer at 64).
What I don't like about diets and supplaments is that there are good experts who argue forcefully on both sides of every argument and while many new ideas come out, no single idea becomes clear. When you add that diet has changed steadily over the last 100 years along with human activities I see no baseline.
As far as exercising the mind being a good activity it's clear what I think. I spend time formally learning something almost every day. I use math every day and do all of it in my head. I interact with ideas for hours with different people. I don't think it means much. I just don't think things work that way. Instead I think humans are desperate for answers to their fears and it doesn't take long before they 'realize' the answers.
Here's a fact for you. Worrying causes stress. Experts disagree on good stress and bad stress. Most successful people live with a lot of stress and don't die early. Too little stress isn't good for us either apparently. Ever get the feeling we have met the enemy and they are us?
Do you agree or not agree that Alzheimer's stops the brain from learning?
Because I believe the disease does prevent the brain from forming long term memory and eventually will destroy the short term memory process too.
Life seems very random. We try to make senses of it and create hypotheses and rules, but the truth is that we are all swatted with the randomness at some time. Occasionally we are even swatted so hard that it knocks us down and out. And what do we do? We get up and try to make sense of it all. Because that is what the human mind does.
I agree with you Marche. We want to find answers because it gives us a sense of control. If we do this or that , it won't happen to me. This disease struck my otherwise perfectly healthy husband at 60 or earlier. His parents lived till 90. He never smoked or drank, was physically fit , ate well and kept his mind and body active.
My life experiences have led me to believe we have very little if any control over life.
I don't believe AD stops the brain from learning. I do believe both short term and long term memory stop working as a result of AD.
AD forms a protein that gums up the ability of the brain cells to connect to each other. Where it does that, where it starts, where it migrates to, and the extent of it's formation all are fairly random although it will spread and migrate at it's own pace. AD has no ability to stop the brain from physically doing what it does it's whole life which is make axons, tendrils, and synapses.
Making them becomes progressively useless. The reason is that there are layers of activity which must work in harmony and meaning which is much of what the brain does beyond laying down memories of first instant.
Let's say that I'm hanging out with Bob next door who's fixing his car and he asks me to get his 3/8" wrench from his toolbox in the garage. I have to assign myself a goal. I need to order the sequence. I need to monitor the progress and manage the events. I need to remember all the components. I need to recognize shapes against a target shape and size. There's a lot going on most of which has nothing to do which the wrench itself.
My brain has tons of areas working while it throws up a temp file because I agreed to get the wrench and sequences the tasks to this goal which are important right now but won't be after I complete it. It puts lights around the 3/8" and that it's a wrench because getting the right tool is the goal. I don't see it and open a drawer in the tool box and there it is. I check that its the right size and bring it back. My mind files the memory of me doing that, connects it to Bob, wrenches, toolboxes, garages, cars, or even my mood and then discards the importance of it.
There are quite a few ways that plaque damage can prevent me from that simple task. Retention. Sequence ordering. Knowledge of the likelihood the wrench is in the drawer. Understanding how drawers work. Object switching. Task switching. Any one of those would be critical failures to complete the chore but all of them would look like the same inability.
I would call simple new memories and memories of those memories as first degree or first instant. We remember Bob and we remember where we met him before. These are the simplest memories and likely the most common. An average sixty year old has somewhere around a billion of them.
Them being there though is completely useless until the brain starts with the second level which literally is what we call meaning because that's what it does. The cat remembers the hot tin roof but even it's brain has created meaning from it and that memory is somewhere else in a more operational and integrated sense. Don't go there is that meaning.
That's just the start. You're still outside of behaviour and personality where the layers and the tapestries the average person creates in their mind because they make their poor brain work all it's life on the turmoil filled experience of cellulite and bikinis becomes mind boggling. Just kidding because your mind is not boggled by it. It takes the tapestries and weaves those together and now you have an opinion about having children from over here.
The brain is cross wired in so many ways it's fantastic but when you gum up important pieces like symbol recognition then they will still know a lot about phones but it won't do any good because they can't deal with symbols. And numbers are symbols and letters are symbols so they can't read anymore either. They can look at the book and form a memory of looking at the book. My wife left heartbreaking notes everywhere trying to figure out what was going wrong and gradually becoming incoherent in the notes themselves until the skill of writing was sufficently gummed up and the notes stopped. There are many audit trails that it wasn't the memories themselves or making them - it was using them the skills of which also reside in the brain accessable to AD.
I believe memory making and skill development continue but those are made in and amongst the plaque. Not much of that gets off the ground because the real life stealling comes when the plaque gums up the nodes where the skills and the nuances themselves reside. It continues until basic life sustaining functions which are also stored in the brain as skills if you will - are sufficiently damaged. Swallowing is one example of such a basic skill.
Nevertheless, my wife has learned to recognize Olga's distinctive voice. Olga is the nurse I pay to help me watch over her. When she hears Olga talking she sometimes bangs on the wheelchair making primitive grunts. She wants Olga to pay attention to her which all the staff agree is absolutely what she does. She doesn't do that any other time. She is learning a skill with a goal and intent and a target which is in her grasp now but which is new territory for the plaque.
But in 40 years together my wife drank one cup of coffee reluctantly. She hated coffee. The staff screwed up. I told them she only drank tea but I didn't notice until I sipped it when I started feeding her lunch. I gave it to her and she drank it right down. The personality that had developed the tapestry to exclude coffee isn't working so she doesn't know she doesn't like it because underneath that she actually doesn't mind coffee at all.
Does Alzheimer's stop the mind from working? No. Does it end up destorying the ability of the mind to operate? Yes. But on the last day and in the last hour that mind is laying down the memory of that moment and it's trying to connect that to something. I guarantee it.
What does that mean to Dianne Fellows my wife? What's left that works can get Olga's attention.