It seems that a lot of the root cause of Alzheimer's advancing to the stages where it's causing cognitive decline is brain inflammation. Keep that
down and it either slows, stops or reverses.
Some things that work on that and seem to work in the lab:
1) tight sugar control
Some docs are calling Alzheimer's "type 3 diabetes" - excess sugar causes both insulin resistance in neurons and inflammation. My paternal family side
is prone to poor sugar control, and tada! Alzheimer's. So for us, at least, that's a problem. Not even diabetes, really, just if you look at the
glucose tolerance test numbers we're all over the damned place when the sugar hits the fan before we recover, and then it's type 2 diabetes in our
later years.
I discovered in college I could not eat starchy crap food or drink sugar drinks without becoming an imbecile for hours. So, I quit. I have bread,
pasta or potatoes about once a quarter to remind me how bad I feel after I eat it. I measured my CRP before and after once, I have a measurably bad
inflammatory reaction to it. So, it's something like paleo for me, all the time.
2) low dose anti-inflammatories
There is at least one NSAID that crosses the blood-brain barrier and reduces inflammation in the brain, and that's mefenamic acid. It's a very old
school first gen NSAID. In animal studies, it reversed Alzheimer's. It's pretty cheap. I take small doses daily. Bonus: you can easily stave off the
potato-retardation by taking it. But the inflammatory reaction I have to sweets and starches lasts longer than the Ponstan dose, so if you're going to
eat that chocolate cake, you have to take Ponstan every six hours for about 24 hours. In general, it's not worth it. I've about stopped any crappy
carbs and now sugar tastes too sweet anyway.
3) leukotriene inhibitors
Part of why your brain becomes inflamed is that white blood cells become alarmed by various false alarms, among them sugars and I'd suspect
neurofibrillary tangles as well. They rush in and sound the alert by releasing leukotrienes, and then you get swelling, decreased circulation, and
more tangles. So a leukocyte stabilizer that crosses the blood-brain barrier can limit that somewhat. There is a cheap one with a long track record
called montelukast. It also reverses Alzheimer's in animal studies.
edit on 8-12-2016 by Bedlam because: (no reason given)