Some strategies may help against Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
* On Prions and Alzheimer's being transmissible https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127520
* On insulin resistance linked to the disease https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/diagnosis-diet/20160...
* On gum disease's links
* On HIV and Herpes medication links to reducing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19099157
No. The article skipped early research based on weak studies that most likely won't hold up once it's looked at closer. That's a good thing. It means the journalist understands something about science.
There seems to be bacteria in the gut and diabetes link or inflammation and diabetes link. Gum disease is known to have effects trough letting bacteria and byproducts into the blood. Antiviral medication (HIV and herpes medication) may fight Alzheimer for the same reasons (they kill viruses and reduce inflammation indirectly).
Infections (bacterial, viral or prion) and/or inflammation they cause may be the common link.
It could be that anything that increases inflammation has link to Alzheimer's.
Exercise, sleep, stress reduction and good nutrition may be linked to infections or inflammation as well. Link may be trough improving immune system to fight infections and/or reducing inflammation.
Chemical conditions that promote inflammation tend to promote infection. Infection tends to cause inflammation.
You likely cannot neatly separate these two health issues.
Seems pretty clear to me that the connection thus runs both ways. It isn't a one way street.
My understanding:
Life was not able to leave the oceans until there were bony fish not simply because of the need for a frame on land, but also because of the need to regulate the blood chemistry. In the ocean, animals don't need this. The minerals in the water regulate their blood chemistry. Out of the water, bones serve as a store of calcium to draw upon to neutralize excess acidity.
If you are seriously and chronically acid, the body will strip the bones of calcium to keep you alive as long as possible, leading to osteoporosis. Blood needs to remain in a very narrow pH range or you quickly die. Diabetics diagnosed with acidosis are hospitalized. It is a medical emergency that can kill you in two or three days.
Most Westerners dismiss the idea of an alkaline diet as nonsense. It gets lumped in with "nutcase" anti-vaxxers for how "scientific" it is deemed to be. But the first defense against acidosis is diet. You need to not be eating too much of the wrong thing.
Correcting it is tricky because if the stomach gets too alkaline, you become incapable of digesting food and you begin throwing up. So brute force methods of consuming strongly alkaline stuff can go bad places. You really need to straighten out your diet as a first line of defense. Trying to "hack" this doesn't work well.
You can google it, though you will probably get a lot of hits that the HN crowd would outright mock. Here are a couple of "respectable" links to get you started:
https://www.livestrong.com/article/381592-normal-body-ph-ran...
Acidosis is medical emergency. Human body contains several pH buffers, is someone would be able to saturate them by eating, they would die.
There is absolutely no connection between alkaline foods and blood pH levels. Eating acidic or alkaline foods has no effect on stomach pH, nor does it has effect on the pH of blood.
Alkaline food can alter urine pH, but there is no effect on elsewhere in the body unless you are really sick.
I can't recall where it read it, but I think it's the result of some phagocytic, either auto- (i.e. lysosomes, intracellular clean up) or macro- (i.e. macrophages, a type of white blood cell used from extracellular clean up).
Seems like there isn't a clear enough syntactical delineation between beneficial (exercise-linked) and harmful (disease/infection-linked) inflammation.
Saying "these steps might" is as bad as the initial pimping of the supplements in the first place. The failures in this space should put is in a mode of "extraordinary claims" -- until these results get exhaustively researched and replicated it is irresponsible to report on them as any more effective than using hexes and energy crystals to stave off dementia.
The first half of the article is all about various dietary supplements and how there is no good evidence for them. But there is decent evidence for exercise, controlling blood pressure, and congnitive training.
This is irresponsible reporting that is falling for the exact same magical thinking that led to the hype around supplements. Because attempts to prevent dementia have been previously shown to be without merit, we should report on new ideas with a great deal of skepticism until the evidence becomes very strong.
A nutritionist with Ph.d with good credibility claims that he got good results with using black sesame seeds. The way he used it is - roast 2 spoons of black sesame seeds and eat once a week for 6 months (no need/should not take every day). He claims to have cured them in 6 months. If I have someone I know I would try as there is no harm in having a regular food item taken once a week. Don't know how it works or if any studies already done to back it up.
The harm is indirect, because they are mixing real medicine wit pseudoscience. There are a lot of miracle "cures" that appear every month. Many of them steal the patients or the family money, other steal just time and hope. And in some cases, people following the alternative cures avoid following the standard treatment that is better ot at leas reduces the suffering.
He's been curing patients for past 20 years with diet changes alone. So, I am impressed with his results and shared his idea. Doing a study on it and not using it until you study is your problem. In other words, I sense your worry of how your medicine will react since it's posion (full of unnatural chemicals) compared to a natural food item in it's unaltered form which is being used in daily food consumption in many cultures. Are you suggesting people taking medicine to stop eating food on a daily basis? I never suggested to stop any medication.
I am more than willing to contact him, will you be able to fund the study?
From your other comment:
> He claims to have cured them in 6 months.
I'm not sure how long it takes to transform a 6 month treatment to a paper. I guess 1 year before for designing, filling all the forms and preparations. And I guess 1 year after to process all the statistics, write the results in a nice form, fighting with the referee/editor. So in 2.5 years it could be published. Let's round it to 3 years because it's not my field of study. [1]
So in 20 years he has enough time to publish a serious paper on a cure an a popular illness that has a lot of people working on it. (Perhaps if the evil Big Pharma is blocking his study, he can replace the pre-registration to a single big announcement in a blog post an a hash of the post in the bitcoin blockchain. It's not official, but any good registration is enough. Most of the other steps, like double-blind, can be made anyway.)
[1] In Physics the typical time is 3 month, but there are very few paperwork because the study doesn't use humans. In Math the typical time is more than 1 year, perhaps 2, because math is forever and the review is proportional.
Here's a meta-analysis of 97 published randomized controlled trials, showing reliable improvements in cognitive function and transfer to real-world function [1]
Here's an NIH-funded study of more then 2,800 older adults followed for 10 years showing that speed-of-processing training reduces the risk of dementia by 29% [2]
Disclosure: I work at a cognitive training company.
[1] PDF link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Catherine_Mewborn/publi...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235287371...
Yowzers -- just squeaked by on that one, didn't they. Given the unknowns around dropouts, I would be frankly astonished if these results stood up. It mainly looks like the "speed" category dubiously "benefited" from a higher death rate; the ~20 excess deaths in that subset can neatly account for ~2 additional cases that drives significance to random-chance levels again.
In addition, the meta-analysis seems to indicate that only memory-based interventions work, while the individual study linked showed differently. Hopefully as pre-registration becomes mandatory it should become clearer how many of these studies were abandoned because of null results.
I feel like I am of those that can easily be fooled by misleading claims.
From [2] (the crash results), deaths and drop-outs were handled by adjusting crash rates to total person-year exposure times. In this study as a whole, non-completion rates were not significantly different across groups.
Yes, pre-registraton is an excellent idea.
Dr. Bredesen published a study in 2014 that found his protocol effective in people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Some (all?) of his protocol is listed here: https://www.apoe4.info/wiki/Bredesen_Protocol
It includes interventions ranging from dietary (daily fasting, autophagy promotion, minimise inflammation & insulin resistance, prebiotics and probiotics), lifestyle (stress, sleep, exercise, sleep apnea, mitochondrial function), vitamins & minerals, hormonal balance, and more.
The recent articles linking Alzheimer's with insulin resistance, gum disease, HIV/herpes, and more are just bite-size recycling of what Bredesen talked about back then, but strangely without mentioning the whole protocol.
The article is trash not because vitamins aren't helpful (they are, but not on their own without the rest of the protocol), but because the Bredesen study has become quite well-known, and not mentioning it seems akin to malpractice. They might want to present the Bredesen study skeptically or critically, but pretending it doesn't exist, when it's shown success, is eerie. It's like writing an article about sugar in 2019 without mentioning its toxic effect on the body.
"We're really on a roll catching all this food. We should fast for three days for autophagy and then post on the internet about it" - every good hunter ever
Well, the article just mentions exercise, but you can obviously also take dietary steps to improve artery function, and that includes certain food supplements. So either none of the tested supplements mentioned earlier in the article improve artery function, or there is something else going on that warrants further research.
Anyway, to continue the "foods for a healthier vascular system" train of thought, nutritionfacts.org has a lot of information on what kind of foods cause stiffer arteries, and which ones help improve artery function. I know from past discussions that this is a controversial site on HN, presumably since it so makes extraordinary claims about a plant-based diet being a cure-all for many illnesses associated with Western lifestyles. However, it is not exactly controversial to call the Western diet unhealthy. Furthermore, the website actually cites nutrition research papers that it bases its claims on. That is a whole lot better than food blogs without scientific sources, or worse: people getting defensive over their food habits and sharing their unsourced opinions on what is and isn't a healthy diet.
The short version is: avoid meat, lots of foods rich in phytonutrients, fibres, and polyphenols. So vegetables, leafy greens, legumes, fruits and berries.
As for magical supplements: crushed flax seeds and the Indian gooseberry both appear to have very positive effects on artery health, cholesterol levels (healthy and unhealthy kinds) and hypertension[0][1][2][3].
Sugar spikes/crashes from foods that are too easy to digest can be mitigated when eaten together with the right ingredient, like blue-berries, cocoa, and vinegar[4][5][6][7][8][9]. On top of being a good thing on its own, it indirectly helps because it reduces overeating.
Both coffee and tea also improve artery function, as long as you avoid adding milk[10][11]. Hibiscus tea works even better, but contains so much manganese that you should probably not drink more than one cup of it per day[12][13].
Oh, and that "one or two glasses of wine is better than none" story? False: the research that this claim comes from did not control for people who don't drink alcohol for other health reasons. Fix that and drinking no alcohol at all is the healthiest option[14]. Sorry.
So yeah, all of that together probably will improve your chances at staying healthy into your old age, especially if you have a family history of hypertension (like me). And that might include a reduced chance of dementia.
[0] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/flax-seeds-for-hypertension...
[1] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/which-are-better-chia-seeds...
[2] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/amla-versus-diabetes/
[3] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/amla-vs-drugs-for-cholester...
[4] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/benefits-of-blueberries-for...
[5] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/The-Benefits-of-Acai-vs-Blu...
[6] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/cocoa-good-chocolate-bad/
[7] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/vinegar-mechanisms-side-eff...
[8] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/can-vinegar-help-with-blood...
[9] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/apple-cider-vinegar-help-we...
[10] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/tea-and-artery-function/
[11] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/does-adding-milk-block-the-...
[12] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/hibiscus-tea-vs-plant-based...
[13] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-much-hibiscus-tea-is-to...
[14] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-it-better-to-drink-littl...
If you eat a diet which is low in fat and cholesterol, you are going to lack the building blocks for your brain. You're going to have a degrading mind.
> Cholesterol travels through the blood on proteins called “lipoproteins.” Two types of lipoproteins carry cholesterol throughout the body:
> LDL (low-density lipoprotein), sometimes called “bad” cholesterol, makes up most of your body’s cholesterol. High levels of LDL cholesterol raise your risk for heart disease and stroke.
> HDL (high-density lipoprotein), or “good” cholesterol, absorbs cholesterol and carries it back to the liver. The liver then flushes it from the body. High levels of HDL cholesterol can lower your risk for heart disease and stroke.
The main purpose of lipoproteins such as LDL and HDL is to carry fatty fuel around the body. Cholesterol just gets a ride-share along with the fat since it is not water (and by extension blood) soluble.
And the thing that makes levels of HDL and LDL in the blood "bad" has more to do with high blood sugar messing up the lipoproteins' ability to identify itself to the liver (search oxidation & glycation of lipoproteins) which causes excess levels in the blood, than it has to do with cholesterol.
IMO the focus on cholesterol (edit: as the source of disease) in popular science and medicine has been a huge mistake.
This is a matter of chemistry.