The Bredesen protocol for treating Alzheimer’s | Hacker News Reader

The Bredesen protocol for treating Alzheimer’s

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

93 pointssjcsjc22 comments

As a theory of Alzheimer's, I'm not sure how useful the Bredesen protocol is. The APP pathway is at its core, but there are thousands of components acting in complex ways. Theories need to be falsifiable; it'd be hard to refute Bredesen since it's a sort of Gestalt of the entire field.

As a treatment though, it seems excellent! We know thousands of tiny details about the Alzheimer's process, what better intervention in a complex, poorly-understood disease than to use everything we've got? Bredesen has published successful trials of this "protocol;" that's all we really need to bear in mind.

After all, many drugs are approved despite the mechanisms not being known. Figuring out the mechanism first failed (as all the blockbuster wipeouts have shown us with AD.) Throw the kitchen sink at it, if you can afford the medical bills.

This reads more like a PR-stunt than science article.

And as far as PR-stunts go, it's not a very good one. If you want to do an end-run around the medical community (which is sometimes quite justified, such as medical marijuana) you need something compelling.

What he should do is get 10 more patients/volunteers, and youtube his progress over 60 days so we can all see before-and-after.

Unfortunately this totally ignores the latest discovery of antivirals efficiency and the probable root cause of viruses from the herpes family.

On the contrary, Bredesen talks about viruses quite a bit in this recent interview...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq7uVZ_0D3U

Specific time points listed in the show notes...

https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dale-bredesen

I’m curious to hear if the shingles vaccine is preventative against Alzheimer’s at all? Varicella and herpes are very closely related.

Is there any description of the actual interventions?

Could this be useful even for healthy people as a way to boost cognitive performance and prevent dementia later in life?

Bredesen has written a book describing it. But the core of it seems to be adopting habits that most HN readers would familiar with as being considered healthy, according to current medical fashion: E.g. eating a low-sugar, calorie-restricted diet, exercising regularly, maintaining gut health using probiotics, avoiding chronic inflammation, getting regular, sufficient and good quality sleep, staying mentally active. Stuff everyone should be doing, regardless of their current age or health.

The list of interventions in that article is really long.

"Increase telomere length" - is that even doable at the moment?

"Increase GABA" - I thought oral GABA supplements do not cross the blood-brain barrier?

Others sure are doable:

"Enhance leptin sensitivity" and "Increase autophagy" can be done AFAIK by intermittent fasting (even better, water fasting several days).

"Enhance mitochondnal function and biogenesis" - any kind of sports, CoQ10 and photobiomodulation come to mind (BTW I've heard of a pilot study where they greatly improved Alzheimer's for ~2 weeks after a treatment with a near-infrared radiation helmet).

"Reduce homocysteine" - supplement B12 (ideally, methylcobalamin).

Most of the mentioned hormones (upper half of right column) can be optimized with medication.

"Reduce inflammation" is likely very beneficial, but tricky; eliminate all foods that cause autoimmune reactions?

Do they give a dosage for CoQ10?

I haven't seen what the authors recommend..

> "Increase GABA" - I thought oral GABA supplements do not cross the blood-brain barrier?

Oral GABA doesn't cross the BBB in appreciable concentrations, but I assume they mean increase GABA neurotransmission, which can be done with any number of ligands that do cross into the brain. Probably not benzos, since long-term usage increases the risk of Alzheimer's (and cognitive impairment is an effect even in healthy individuals). But perhaps something like baclofen (chloro-phenyl-GABA) which was tested in a rat model here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29133125

I believe this is the 2014 paper referred to in the article: https://www.aging-us.com/article/100690/text

Do studies of the efficacy of this method exist, and if so does anyone have a link?

More quack science.

See https://respectfulinsolence.com/2016/06/17/the-mend-protocol... for a slightly less breathless account.

From the respectfulinsolencecom article:

" '... Interventions targeting specific biological mechanisms are then prioritized and prescribed to optimize key biological mechanisms. Medication doses are specified to an individual’s needs. Individuals are re-tested periodically and the protocol is updated as necessary.'

What the hell does this even mean?"

With that type of attitude it will be hard to accept anything novel regardless of it's merits.

Quite the contrary.

The interior quote contains no information. The description provides no way to distinguish the results from a protocol of "we're making this shit up as we go along." For a field that is rife with quackery, any serious scientific study should be going to pains to distinguish it from quackery.

The author is an M.D. and oncological researcher. New developments in medicine are his bread and butter. That blurb sounds impressive and "oh, I'm really being taken care of!" to a layman, but to someone with actual domain expertise it sounds like "I'll create a GUI interface in Visual Basic to track an IP address".

Key questions to consider: What, exactly, is being tested? How? How do the results affect medication dosage? Which medications? How does this differ from existing medical practice where doctors routinely adjust dosages to balance efficacy and unwanted side effects?

That’s a pretty fair assessment I’d say. Things like improved diet and exercise (and going on Aricept) will almost certainly improve things for a while, but they won’t alter the overall trajectory of the disease. So this all might have some benefit, but you’re better off saving your money for long term care, which is expensive.

Agreed, it is getting increasingly harder for me to understand why intelligent people can read stuff like this and not see it for what it is.

I've seen Alzheimer's first hand and if I get it my treatment will be finding a way to die before my family has to deal with me.

> Agreed, it is getting increasingly harder for me to understand why intelligent people can read stuff like this and not see it for what it is.

It's technobabble. Most people don't have intimate familiarity with medical protocols, but well-read people probably have come across articles recently that talk about, say, the impact of telemeres on aging or the importance of the gut microbiome. Name-drop that, and people will nod their heads and assume that the science all checks out.

If you are familiar with quack science, something should leap out, and that is mention of "leaky gut".

In short, "leaky gut" is the theory that your intestines are leaking waste into your the rest of your body and it is causing pretty much all other problems. While there is a true condition that causes it, the pseudoscience says this is common and somehow treatable through quackery. Usually "treated" by buying medicine from the quack or books on how to treat from the quack.

https://www.badgut.org/information-centre/a-z-digestive-topi...

"A cure" is a very deceptive headline; it's an allegedly curative personalized protocol, The Bredesen Protocol™.

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