Alzheimer's/dementia brain atrophy reduced > 50% with "pennies per day" B vitamins

[Mr. Blue Sky]

After billions spent on failed AD trials...it come to light that vitamins costing pennies, may be the only effective treatment at present...

A cheap regimen of vitamins in use for decades is seen by scientists as a way to delay the start of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, a goal that prescription drugs have failed to achieve. Drugmakers including Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Pfizer Inc. (PFE) and Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) have spent billions of dollars on ineffective therapies in a so-far fruitless effort to come up with a treatment for dementia and Alzheimer’s. Now, in the latest of a steady drumbeat of research that suggests diet, exercise and socializing remain patients’ best hope, a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that vitamins B6 and B12 combined with folic acid slowed atrophy of gray matter in brain areas affected by Alzheimer’s disease.

In the PNAS study, researchers tracked 156 people ages 70 and older who had mild memory loss and high levels of a protein previously linked to dementia. Among people with elevated homocysteine, the study found that the amount of gray matter declined 5.2 percent in those taking a placebo, compared with 0.6 percent in those who took the vitamin cocktail. The supplements cost about 30 cents a day in pharmacies and health-food stores.

“It’s the first and only disease-modifying treatment that’s worked,” said A. David Smith, professor emeritus of pharmacology at Oxford University in England and senior author of the study. “We have proved the concept that you can modify the disease.” “It’s a big effect, much bigger than we would have dreamt of,” A. David Smith said. “I find the specificity of this staggering. We never dreamt it would be so specific.” Smith and his colleagues at Oxford reported in 2010 that the atrophy rate in patients’ whole brains was reduced about 30 percent in those taking the vitamins and 53 percent in those on the vitamins who also had elevated homocysteine. They published study results in 2012 of memory tests that found people on the treatment who had high homocysteine were 69 percent likelier to correctly remember a list of 12 words.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-20/vitamins-that-cost-pennies-a-day-seen-delaying-dementia.html

[freshwest]

1. Nice. And keep hydrated and inflammation down, supposed to help.