The end of Alzheimer's?

A post about Alzheimer’s, dementia, cognitive decline today. A subject close to a lot of peoples' hearts because there is so much of this disease out there. Close to my heart too …my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago.

To date there have been no real therapeutic advances in this field. None of the drugs trialled has had any significant impact. But now there is hope….Dr Dale Bredesen and Apollo Health have published the preliminary results of his randomised control trial, the Evanthea trial. This trial recruited participants in the early stages of cognitive decline or dementia – that’s important, that’s when the most difference can be made.

So what did the trial involve? Participants were split into 2 groups. Group A were asked to follow a programme of “personalised medicine”, while Group B were asked to continue to follow the current advice of their physician; to continue taking the drug that their doctor deemed the best fit for them.

Group A, the personalised medicine group, had to do 2 things unconditionally:

• They had to get into ketosis. This means get into a state where the body is producing ketones; it essentially means that the main fuel for the cells is fat (and not glucose / carbohydrates). To those of you who’ve not come across this it might sound a bit odd, but keto diets have a long therapeutic history. They were first trialled for epilepsy in children, another brain disease, where they had great results  (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7387249).

• They also had to exercise 6 days out of 7 a week. I don’t know what kind of exercise they had to do but all participants had support in this – a PT or exercise coach of some kind.

These 2 were non-negotiable – if participants didn’t do this, they were not allowed to continue on the trial.

Then the group A participants also underwent a barrage of tests – mainly functional tests by the way – to find out what else might be going on. They looked at factors that typically drive inflammation – Alzheimer’s is a disease of brain inflammation. So they looked at blood sugar and insulin, viral load, bacterial infections, mould exposure, tick-borne infections, quality of sleep, etc etc. Then each person had an individualised plan drawn up to tackle the specific challenges going on for them.

The results? After 9 months, all the participants in group A had got better memory. All the participants in group B had got worse. The dark blue line in the graph is for Group A, and the red line is for Group B. The axis on the left is memory score.

By the way, after the trial, all the participants in Group B were given the opportunity to undergo the precision medicine programme offered to Group A – the ethics become very dodgy otherwise.

Some details that are fascinating:

• There were some “overnight miracles” where participants came out of their dementia literally in a few days. The first was when a participant moved out of their mould-infested home; another was when a participant dealt with their sleep apnoea.

• Many participants improved their overall health, not just their memory. “In the trial we saw statistically significant improvements in…blood pressure, in BMI, in homocysteine, in HbA1c, in lipid profiles. So again and again we’re seeing this improvement not just in the brain, but also in physiology”.

• One participant was scheduled to have 3 different joint replacements. “He told me he could barely get up the stairs. He had to walk sideways and hold on because he had so much pain. Guess what? All those joints are now normal. Now he has no more pain. He doesn’t need joint replacement surgeries. What a wonderful side-effect of our study”

• One particularly interesting discovery is around amyloid. This protein has been targeted in drug development because when there is Alzheimer’s, there is usually amyloid protein build up in the brain. But be careful…. This is like saying “when there is a fire, there always seem to be fire engines…”. It turns out that the amyloid may be there because it is trying to heal the brain… it tends to be good at killing herpes simplex viruses in the brain. Another substance that shows up in the brain of Alzheimer’s sufferers is alpha synuclein. This one seems to be good at killing off E. coli in the brain.

This is just the tip of the iceberg – there is so much more fascinating stuff in the study! You can go read the full report on Dr Bredesen’s site Apollo Health here https://www.apollohealthco.com/rct-2025/.

I wish this were reported in mainstream media. One thing - the trial has not yet undergone peer review; maybe they will once this is done? I do hope so because this is so important.

The one other thing I would say is this… if you have noticed brain / memory changes, or someone has pointed this out to you, act sooner rather than later. Down the line may be too late.

Book a discovery call here if this peaks your interest.

To health! To personalised medicine!

Marie