I’m a Brain Doctor, and This Is What I Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s

The first sentence in the following was me. Well, yea! It seems my prayers may have been answered.

Anyway the linked article talks about what no one wants to talk about. The link between aluminum poisoning and Alzheimer’s. There has been scientific research to back up the link but it doesn’t get any widespread exposure. I wonder why?

“If they had to suffer a modern scourge, most adults say they’d rather have cancer than Alzheimer’s.

Unlike cancer, there is no promise of a cure for Alzheimer’s, no treatment on the horizon, nothing mainstream medicine can offer to even slow its intrusion. It strikes unpredictably, silently crippling neurons, robbing its victims of their memories, shrinking their brains, their independence and judgment, erasing their personalities, and eventually claiming their lives. It is currently the sixth leading cause of death.

The disease, which afflicts more than five million Americans today and more than 40 million people globally, is expected to soar to more than 150 million by mid-century. As your age increases, so do your odds of being stricken. If you are fortunate enough to reach the ripe old age of 85, you will also have about a one in two chance of being demented by Alzheimer’s.

Public health agencies, doctors, and patient support groups say there is nothing you can do to prevent it. The greatest risk factors for getting Alzheimer’s that they identify are your age and your genes. But that message – that Alzheimer’s disease is just a bad lottery ticket – is in contrast to a growing body of evidence that points to a single environmental toxin as a primary culprit in some (if not most) Alzheimer’s cases.

Aluminum’s toxicity to the central nervous system is documented way back to the early 20th century, shortly after the metal began to be extracted from its stable natural form in the earth’s crust in the 1890s. Its association with Alzheimer’s is decades old and supported by hundreds of studies. But public health advocates, if they acknowledge the connection at all, downplay it as “unsubstantiated” or dismiss it as “myth.” However, evidence against the metal with a long rap sheet for brain toxicity just keeps piling up.

The latest research comes from the United Kingdom, and the lab of aluminum researchers at Keele University. Professor of bioinorganic chemistry Christopher Exley has been studying the effects of the metal in biological systems there for more than 30 years in fish gills, breast tissue, baby formula, mice, bumblebees, heroin addicts – and the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

For the current study, published in the Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology, Exley got hold of rare samples of brain tissue from 12 patients who had died from an uncommon “familial” form of Alzheimer’s that strikes people young – in their 30s and 40s as opposed to their 60s and 70s. These patients have genetic mutations associated with a protein called amyloid-beta, which has been heavily implicated in all forms of Alzheimer’s.

The Case of Auguste Deter and the Significance of “Familial” Alzheimer’s
This familial form of the disease may be rare, affecting only two to three percent of Alzheimer’s sufferers, but they are something like canaries in a coalmine. Understanding how these susceptible patients are affected is key to unlocking a whole spectrum of the disease.

The very first case of Alzheimer’s was one of these young patients. Her name was Auguste Deter. The wife of a railroad worker, she suffered memory loss and delusions that began in her late 40s, and couldn’t sleep at night, when she would often wail for hours. She was institutionalized in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1901 at age 51 where Alois Alzheimer was her doctor.

Dr. Alzheimer had observed this new condition in other patients recently, but in none as young as Auguste. After she died in 1906, he examined her brain and found the hallmark “senile plaques” and “neurofibrillary tangles” of the disease named for him.

Auguste’s brain slides were rediscovered recently, and in 2012 scientists reported in The Lancet that new analysis revealed she carried the PSEN1 gene mutation leaving her vulnerable to Alzheimer’s. Auguste was a medical curiosity at the turn of the last century, but today a half million Americans under age 65 have her disease.

In this latest study, aluminum was found in every brain sample tested, and at “extremely high” levels. “Overall, the concentrations were higher than all previous measurements of brain aluminum except cases of known aluminum-induced encephalopathy,” Exley reported”

Read more here

For sure diet and exercise can help but there is more to this than just diet and exercise.