New findings dispute conventional Alzheimer’s wisdom

With the media still busy in its post-election frenzy of coverage, apparently it just couldn’t find the time to report on the latest major finding about Alzheimer’s disease.

Neuroscientists from the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago have pretty much come out and said that everything we’ve been told about this devastating illness is flat-out wrong.

And that includes an expensive, FDA-approved test that some doctors are promoting to see if you’re at risk.

Big Pharma may be spending billions looking for a treatment, but what this new information tells us is that it looks like drugmakers are off in the wrong direction.

Barking up the wrong tree?

Big Pharma is falling all over itself to come up with a new drug for Alzheimer’s that the FDA will approve.

It doesn’t really matter if it works or not – if the FDA approves it, billions of dollars will start falling from the sky into the drug industry’s pockets.

But most, if not all, of these experimental meds are being cooked up based on the idea that when a brain shows deposits of amyloid plaques, that means an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is set in stone.

However, as I told you over a year ago, plenty of perfectly healthy seniors who could be Jeopardy! champions have amyloid deposits in their brains. Studies going back decades found that having these brain plaques doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll go on to develop Alzheimer’s.

What makes this current research so solid, however, is that these “Alzheimer’s brains” came from people well into their 90s. They were part of research called the “90+ study” at the University of California.

During the course of the research, the volunteers take part in memory tests. When eight of the participants (who had scored especially high in those tests) passed away, their brains were examined and several were found to be filled with the classic Alzheimer’s plaques.

One of the neurologists in this study said the findings show that these plaques can be found in the brains of elderly people “who are cognitively normal or even superior.”

It would seem these findings should put the kibosh on an FDA-approved brain scan that some doctors are saying should now be given to everyone over 50!

But drugmakers, most notably Eli Lilly, are hanging their hats on those scans by using them to test experimental drugs. If seniors discovered to have brain plaques do well on whatever med is being studied, why, it’s a winner!

And if you’re wondering what the researchers at Feinberg think all this means, they have a few ideas.

One is that if people keep their minds active throughout their lives (they call it being “intellectually engaged”) their brains will keep functioning despite losing neurons in important “thinking regions.”

They compared that to a computer hard drive still functioning despite the loss of some documents.

The second is that people can produce protective molecules in their brains that can make amyloids nontoxic.

But perhaps most telling is that the researchers said it may be what you “do in your life (that) somehow protects” against assaults to your brain.

And that sounds very familiar. Because for years now I’ve been telling you about the newest findings in ways to guard your brain.

For example:

• Researchers have found that acupuncture can help protect the brain from memory loss.
• A study at UCLA last year discovered that if you treat inflammation and nutritional deficiencies with supplements and a good diet, it can reverse symptoms of dementia.
• Research at the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen found medium-chain fatty acids, like what’s found in coconut oil, can “postpone aging processes” and help Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients.

It all boils down to the fact that pharma’s research is still in its infancy where Alzheimer’s is concerned. And that a centuries-old practice and Mother Nature’s bounty appear to be far better treatments than anything it has yet to come up with.

“Their brains had the telltale signs of Alzheimer’s. So why did they still have nimble minds?” Sharon Begley, November 14, 2016, Stat, statnews.com