Alzheimer’s Disease Reversed For the First Time

[elleng]

6. 'Dr. Bredesen’s study upends the current hypothesis of the origins of AD.

The current view is that Alzheimer’s is a disease caused by the accumulation of sticky plaques in the brain. But Bredesen’s work shows evidence that AD stems from an imbalance in nerve cell signaling. And It indicates that at least the early stages of cognitive decline may be driven by metabolic processes. In other words, “you are what you eat” is a fair summary of reality. Further, what and how you eat today will affect your cognitive as well as physical health.
The following summary is a lay person’s takeaway of the events in the brain that lead to AD, per Bredesen. The healthy brain generates some electronic signals that have the specific tasks of improving nerve connections and storing memories. Other signals break down memories, losing information. (This might be useful if you want to clear the space occupied by a list of dead presidents, which knowledge you no longer want to retain. But alas, the memory breakers do not select, saying that some memories have lost their usefulness, whereas other memories, such as the poem you had to memorize for graduation exercises in the 6th grade, have value.) There is a balance of memory makers to memory breakers that favors memory making in the healthy brain. But in a brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease, the breakers begin to outnumber the makers, by suppressing nerve connecting signals.

Dr. Bredesen’s study results should be interpreted with a lot of caution, primarily because of the small size of the study group, and because the participants had a range of diagnoses, resulting in different interventions. But the basis of his work was the idea that there are multiple risk factors leading to AD, and therefore, a multiple factor approach, rather than administration of one drug or another, would show beneficial results. In fact, this theory seems to be right, given that 9 out of 10 patients recovered mental functions, and 6 of the 10 returned to work with improved functioning.

Dr. Bredesen’s multiple factors include diet, exercise, sleep, stress reduction, and brain training, commonsensical in the broad view. But he has identified 36 separate elements of a therapeutic system for patients, many of which are surprising to more traditional western medicine.'