Edward was a successful businessman with companies on both the East and West coasts of the United States. He would meet with his accountants and add columns of numbers immediately in his head before the accountants could do so on their calculators. As he approached 60, however, he began to have memory problems. One day at the gym, he panicked when he forgot the combination to his locker, and his lock had to be cut. His memory continued to decline. Het could no longer add columns of numbers rapidly in his head and he had difficulty remembering people he had met. A PET scan revealed Alzheimer’s disease.
From then a rapidly accelerating journey downhill began. When he turned 69, tests indicated marked memory loss. He scored in the 3rd percentile—that means that 97 percent of people perform better—of a standard Alzheimer’s memory test. His doctor suggested he wind down his businesses and plan for the full-time care he would soon need.
Soon after that depressive news, Edward and his wife heard a radio program about a new treatment regimen developed by Professor Dale Bredesen that had been documented to reverse early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. They contacted Bredesen and Edward started the experimental treatment. Six months later, his wife and his staff noted that Edward was clearly improving. After almost two years on the program, Bredesen persuaded his patient to take another test with the same neuropsychologist who had given him the original bad news.
“I was driving up the California coast when my cell phone rang”, writes Bredesen in his bestselling book The End of Alzheimer’s: The first program to prevent and reverse cognitive decline. Edward’s neuropsychologist asked him to come over to discuss the results of the new tests. Edward had improved from the 3rd to the 84th percentile. “In 30 years of practice I have never seen such results”, said the neuropsychologist.
When we meet on a sunny Tuesday morning in January in Santa Barbara, California, Bredesen reflects on the experience: “We used to say: ‘Everybody knows a cancer survivor; nobody knows an Alzheimer’s survivor’. That is no longer the case.”
Edward’s remarkable journey of recovery started in 2013. Since then, some 5,000 people have followed the ‘Bredesen Protocol’ with many of them experiencing equally impressive results. In a new scientific study by Bredesen, which is about to be published, results show that more than 70 percent of Alzheimer patients experienced clear progress. They do better after the treatment. “It is most encouraging that we know why the remaining patients are not succeeding”, adds Bredesen.
It is estimated that some 50 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s in the world today. That is almost three times the number of current cancer patients. Alzheimer’s disease is the only cause of death in the world’s top 10 that is becoming more prevalent over time. Since 2015, Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia are already the leading cause of death in the United Kingdom. There are 330 million Americans living today. It is projected that 10 percent of them will die of Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer Disease International (ADI) estimates the financial burden of dementia included unpaid care provided by family members at $1 trillion. In other words: Alzheimer’s poses a major—financial and social—threat to society.
According to mainstream medicine, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s. In past decades, more than 200 drugs have gone through clinical trials—which often come with a $50 million price tag. All these tested drugs have failed, and billions have been lost.
“Alzheimer’s is not a simple disease”, says Bredesen. He refers to the fact that, a hundred years ago, people were dying from “simple illnesses”. Most of these diseases—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, hepatitis, etc.—were infectious. Such illnesses are caused by one organism. There is one bacterium, virus, or parasite which is the target. Bredesen: “The great success of 20th century medicine is that between public health policies and antibiotics most of these diseases have been conquered.”
Today, people die from “complex chronic degenerative illnesses”: cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more. In these diseases, cells and organs increasingly deteriorate and die over time. “The problem is that we use the same strategy to treat these diseases as we have successfully used with the simple infectious diseases,” says Bredesen. Conventional medicine is searching for one drug to cure Alzheimer’s—a degenerative disease that is caused by lifestyle and environmental circumstances in which many different factors play a role.
In his book, Bredesen describes 36(!) “inputs” which could lead to Alzheimer’s—from food to stress and sleep patterns, and from environmental toxins to genetics. The point is that if the disease can be caused in many different ways, there will be many different cures as well: There is not one Alzheimer’s drug. Bredesen compares the challenge with a roof with many leaks. “If you want to keep the water out of your home, you need to patch all the holes. Patching one of the holes with ‘one pill’ does not make a lot of sense…”.
Bredesen notes that humans have become very familiar with complex technology in other sectors of society—with computer programs that fly aircraft and drive cars, for instance. When these programs fail, there are many possible causes, and it requires a diligent and precise approach to check all the elements of the system to find the root of the failure. “Nobody would accept it, if a car mechanic would simply tell you: ‘We know this problem. It is called the car-not-working-syndrome. We have no solution for it.’ But that is basically the message of modern medicine when it comes to degenerative diseases. ‘There is no drug. Please go home; you are going to die’. You expect the car mechanic to begin checking things and get your car to work again. You should expect the same from your doctor.”
Bredesen began his career as a researcher of neurodegenerative diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. He worked under Professor Stanley Prusiner who later received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of ‘prions’—the term he used to describe agents, smaller than viruses, that cause rare neurological diseases. In the late eighties, Bredesen established his own lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. He spent years studying “programmed cell death”, the process that drives degenerative disease. Why do cells under specific conditions begin to “commit suicide”?
In a healthy body, there is an ongoing—balanced—process of cell growth and death. Disease results when that process is disturbed. When there is too much cell growth, there is cancer. When there is too much cell death, there is degenerative disease. Bredesen: “We discovered that the process of cell death started when certain cells are not receiving the input they need. There is a mismatch. When that mismatch becomes chronic, the system begins to deteriorate.”
Physical deterioration is a very gradual process. “It can take one or two decades from the moment of the first symptoms to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease”, says Bredesen. “The good news is that you have a long time to address complex chronic illnesses.”
Bredesen distinguishes three progressive phases in Alzheimer’s. In the beginning, there is “subjective cognitive impairment” (SCI). The spouse of a patient may notice that there is something wrong, but memory tests do not yet show anything. There is “mild cognitive impairment” (MCI) when patients begin to test abnormally and they themselves know there is something wrong. Finally, there is the advanced stage of the disease.
Bredesen developed an extensive protocol to test for the 36 factors that may influence Alzheimer’s and subsequently treat the patient based on the individual results. After almost ten years of treating thousands of patients, Bredesen says: “Virtually 100 percent of the people with SCI get better. The majority of the people with MCI get better. We even see some patients with full-scale Alzheimer’s disease getting better. That was initially an enormous surprise to us.”
Remarkably, Bredesen argues that “compliance” is the biggest cause for unsuccessful treatments. “It is not easy to address all the different factors that may play a role. We recommend that patients use a health coach.” In addition to challenging dietary restrictions, it can be hard to change circumstances. People may have exposure to toxins in their home. They cannot or do not want to move and/or choose to stay in the home while the problem is being fixed. It is not uncommon that the cleaning process increases the toxic exposure while the disease keeps deterioration.
As the circumstances and conditions of patients vastly differ, the ‘Bredesen protocol’ is a highly personalized program based on an individual’s genetics and biochemistry. “This is the era of ‘programmatic medicine’,” says Bredesen, “We are ending the era of mono-therapeutics: It is not ‘one size fits all’.” To reverse cognitive decline, patients should act as “competitive athletes”, he says. “We want everything in your body to be as optimal as possible.”
The treatment program is offered by Apollo Health, a company partially owned by Bredesen. The treatment is not cheap. The extensive ‘baseline blood test’ may cost up to $1,000. Based on the outcome, the expenses of supplements for the patients may come to $400 a month. There are consultations with practitioners who have been trained by Bredesen. As Bredesen’s pioneering work is only beginning to be recognized, not much of these expenses is covered by health insurance providers. Then there are possible additional expenses for mold remediation or protection from electromagnetic fields at home or at work.
Bredesen argues that the cost of his protocol should be compared with the expenses of an Alzheimer patient living in a nursing home and needing 24-hour care with an annual bill that can be more than $100,000. That is a fair comparison. The challenge is that in the current situation insurances cover the costs of the nursing home but not the costs of the Bredesen protocol. For that to change, mainstream medicine has to change.
Fellow scientists assert that Bredesen does not have enough data to support his groundbreaking conclusions about stopping and reversing cognitive decline. They dismiss the fact that some 5,000 people have gone through the program with mostly outstanding results because, so far, only about a hundred of these cases have been documented in studies published in scientific journals.
“You have to start somewhere”, Bredesen shrugs.
He points out that his proposal for the first comprehensive clinical trial with Alzheimer’s and pre-Alzheimer’s patients was turned down because “it was too complicated”. The review panel argued: “You do not understand how to do a clinical trial because you are recommending changing more than one variable.”
“You do not understand Alzheimer’s”, Bredesen responded, “this is not a single-variable disease.”
The exchange goes to the core of the challenge Bredesen and other pioneers in medicine are facing. “Classical medicine was about what”, Bredesen says, “What is the diagnosis? It is heart failure? Cancer? Or diabetes? The new medicine is about why. Why did you get this disease? You need to look at all the different pieces and classical medicine, unfortunately, does not do that.”
In a way, medicine needs to go back to its roots. Ancient healers and shamans had a holistic perspective on human health, and they understood the relationship between the brain and the body. However, they had no knowledge about DNA, RNA, microbiomes and the inner workings of cells. Modern doctors have a much more detailed understanding of the human body. But they lack the ability to connect all the different parts. “Systems medicine is a new thing”, says Bredesen. He argues that doctors need to be trained in both the ancient and modern traditions.
Bredesen’s thinking about Alzheimer’s begins to resonate in mainstream medicine circles. In 2017, the British medical journal The Lancet set up one of its special commissions on ‘Dementia prevention, intervention, and care’. In its 2020 report, the Commission identified a long list of ‘lifestyle’ risk factors for dementia that echo Bredesen’s findings: obesity, diabetes, depression, lack of exercise, air pollution, low social contact, less education, excessive alcohol consumption, and more. Controlling these factors, the Commission writes, can delay or even prevent up to 40 percent of dementia cases.
The success of Bredesen’s program and the report of The Lancet Commission clearly invite further investigation and research of the impact of lifestyle choices on Alzheimer’s disease. Nonetheless, most of the research remains focused on amyloid—the plaque-like protein that attaches on nerve cells in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and interferes with their brain’s signaling system. Pharmaceutical companies are still spending millions trying to develop drugs that can get rid of this plaque. It is remarkable that Bredesen’s research draws a completely different conclusion about amyloid. “We have found that amyloid is made in the brain as a protective response when there is a lack of essential inputs”, he says. Amyloid appears when the brain is downsizing, a known characteristic of Alzheimer’s patients. Bredesen: “Again, the question is: why is that happening? Just getting rid of amyloid simply does not make sense.”
Bredesen sees the problem: “Medicine has a history of being about tradition and permission rather than about precision and remission. Unfortunately, there is a lot more adherence to tradition than to truth in the medical world.” He is convinced that all major chronic illness is the result of a mismatch between the input the body receives and the nutritional needs of the cells. The mismatch causes—chronic—inflammation. And inflammation lies at the root of all degenerative diseases—at least on that medicine agrees today.
Does that the mean that the Bredesen protocol would also work against other diseases? “The mismatch is different for each disease”, Bredesen says. In other words: Alzheimer’s is different from Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease or macular degeneration. “But the fundamental principle is the same.” Indeed, Bredesen’s website quotes a French doctor reporting “encouraging results” treating his Parkinson’s patients with the protocol.
The challenge is massive. More than 40 percent of the adults in the world are overweight. Thirty percent of overweight people have type 2 diabetes. And type 2 diabetes doubles the risk for Alzheimer’s. Bredesen: “We now essentially live in a society in which we are giving ourselves Alzheimer’s disease.”
Bredesen opens his book The End of Alzheimer’s with a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
The words describe the journey of a dissident. “I never set out to be an activist”, Bredesen says, “I set out to be a physician and a scientist, but I learned 20th century medicine and we are living in the 21st century.”
A reluctant activist perhaps. After a moment of reflection, Bredesen looks back at his youth in the 1960s watching the hippies and listening to The Beatles. “Everything was about activism, about going against the establishment.” Half a century later, he sees a similar crisis: “Unfortunately, the establishment is not giving us optimal medicine today. Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases should be rare diseases and we can make them rare diseases today! Let us reduce the global burden of dementia. Let us reduce the global burden of neurodegenerative disease, and—ultimately—let us reduce the global burden of complex chronic illness. You have to keep looking at the goal: How can we make things better?” [JK]
More information: www.apollohealthco.com
