What Works in Treating Alzheimer's?

If there is anything that a layperson can gain from reading Dr. Bredesen's papers, it's that no single treatment works for everyone who has Alzheimer's. In fact, single treatments don't do much good for anyone at all. However, combinations of simple interventions can, essentially, work wonders.

Let's look at what the doctor ordered for each of the patients mentioned on the first page.

• The first patient was the 67-year-old analyst who couldn't remember what she had read and couldn't remember how to get home. For her, the doctor ordered elimination of sugar and all simple carbohydrates from the diet, elimination of gluten, daily yoga practice, daily meditation time, increasing sleep from four to five hours per night to seven to eight hours per night with the help of melatonin, vitamin D, fish oil, CoQ-10, hormone replacement therapy, fasting overnight (no midnight snacks), flossing, and six half-hour sessions of light exercise every week.

• The second patient was the 55-year-old lawyer who forgot her meetings with her clients. For her, the doctor prescribed fasting overnight, elimination of sugar and processed foods from the diet, avoiding farm-raised fish, no meat, exercising four to five times a week, reducing stress by relaxation and meditation, taking a small dose of melatonin to be able to get eight hours of sleep every night her schedule permitted, activated forms of vitamin B6 (pyridoxine-5-phosphate) and vitamin B12 (methylcobalamin), CoQ-10, vitamin D, DHA and EPA (but not fish oil), bioidentical hormone replacement, and reducing her use of antidepressants.

• The third patient was the 69-year-old businessman who had had memory problems for 11 years. He made a habit of fasting overnight, increased his consumption of fruits and vegetables, limited his consumption of chicken and beef to organic varieties, took coconut oil, took probiotics, took ashwagandha, turmeric, and bacopa, took vitamin C, vitamin D, and vitamin E, took methylcobalamin 1mg, methyltetrahydrofolate 0.8mg, and pyridoxine-5-phosphate 50mg, and took CoQ-10, DHA, EPA, zinc, and alpha-lipoic acid.

What is important to understand about these three patients is that they did not follow their doctor's orders perfectly. There might be days they failed to take a particular supplement and weeks they failed to follow a lifestyle recommendation. None of these recommendations, however, required anything approaching the financial outlay required for medication. None of them had serious side effects (although one person Dr. Bredesen worked with was sufficiently advanced in the disease that it was difficult to swallow all the capsules, and this person did not get better). There was no single magic nutrient that erased Alzheimer's, but taken altogether, they seem to have arrested the disease.

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This study represents the first time Alzheimer's disease has ever been reversed. The ironic finding is that there are many equally valid approaches to nutritional support for Alzheimer's disease. Together, they may do things that no single medication can do. The key is to start nutritional intervention while symptoms are still somewhat manageable, and just to keep doing the best you can. Perfect compliance with nutritional programs isn't necessary. Making your best effort sometimes works wonders.