Genetic or Environmental: how to find out and what to do

So if there's a possibility you really have Alzheimer's...

Why? How did you get it? Does it run in the family? Did you do something wrong, eat the wrong thing, spray too much insecticide in your back yard?

A laboratory in Massachusetts, Athena Labs, is one of the few places that will actually run a genetic blood test to see if you are genetically predisposed to getting Alzheimer's. It's called the APOe test, and checks for some specific chromosomes dealing with not only your likeliness to contract the disease, but also your genetic ability to fight it.

It's a blood test worth getting if you have any question. Either way, it will give you an answer that will either allay your fears or give you a heads up to begin fighting it with some urgency.

In our case, as it turns out, my wife had the best genetic results we could hope for. Not only is she NOT predisposed to getting it, she also has the best combination to fight it... So our next question was, why did she get it?

If it's not genetic, then it must be environmental.

So I began diligently scouring the web for answers... and found that the first skill I needed to develop is sifting the legitimate doctors from the snake oil salesmen an the old, outdated, information from the new.

Believe me, there are a ton of snake oil sales solutions to Alzheimer's, and any other ailment you might have. To make matters more interesting, there can be some significant truths in what you will learn from reading the snake oil sales pitches... I mean to say, there are always some significant truths built into any good lie. When you're reading these pitches, they've got to get you thinking 'yeah! I believe that!' to several points before they sneak in the twisted or false statements, and frankly, many times the writers don't believe they are sending you down the guilded path at all... they actually believe it themselves. So, the only real solution is to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I can't tell you how to do that, I just can (most of the time) and I think it just comes from life experience and reading a "whole bunch" of both truth and fiction.

Here are some clues: If just one product from one source will save your life and you can get rich selling it... If you can find no corroborating information from other sources or find it difficult to validate specific case studies cited... If there seems to be only one medical guru in the world who knows the secret... well, you catch my drift.

Here's what I've learned:

The primary environmental causes of Alzheimer's, as determined by autopsy of people who died from complications of Alzheimer's (I don't think anyone actually ever dies of Alzheimer's itself) are:

Heavy Metals:

1. Mercury
2. Lead
3. Aluminum

Poisons:

1. Arsenic
2. Pesticides

Foods:

1. Additives
2. Trans-fats
3. Artificial Sweeteners
4. Preservatives

Any of these can be significant contributors to the onset of Alzheimer's and many can be avoided, some can be reversed and none are actually proven to be THE central cause.

Let's take heavy metals, for example:

Mercury: Well, canned tuna is a prime source. So if you lived on a diet of significant amounts of fish, most notably canned tuna for some period of your life, maybe mercury is the culprit. As a kid, did you ever play with a silvery slimy ball of mercury from a broken thermometer? Maybe that's were the level of exposure came from. One of the most innocuous sources is those silver colored fillings in your teeth... what the dentists call Amalgam fillings. There's a significant amount of mercury in those fillings.

Lead: Did you grow up in an old house and eat paint chips off a hand-me-down crib or off the porch rails. Did you chew pencils in school (even the paint on the outside may have contained lead to make the paint shiny). Did you handle a lot of fishing tackle with lead weights? Chew wooden or metal toys with shiny paint?

Aluminum: Did you cook with aluminum cookware? Teflon covered aluminum frypans where the teflon had been scratched through to the aluminum? What about soda or beer in aluminum cans? Foods stored or re-cooked in aluminum foil?

OK... some sources will tell you that you are chicken little running around saying the sky is falling if you jump on the heavy metal bandwagon. Still, we were not about to take any chances.

1: We removed my wife's Amalgam fillings and had them replaced with composite fillings.

2: We found a method to detox the body of heavy metal poisoning... which *could be* snake oil medicine, but we had it from multiple sources that taking a high dosage of chlorophyll was a natural solution to help the body reduce or eliminate stored amounts of heavy metals, most notably mercury, and that chlorella (available in any health food store) was the most effective treatment, so we went through several weeks of taking the highest recommended dosage of these little green pills. The only negative side effect of which was (as it said on the bottle) that it makes you a bit *windy*. An understatement in our experience.

Poisons:

We couldn't find any Arsenic in our garage or under our sinks, or any use of pesticides that would have been significant enough for us to focus on poisons, though we stopped doing ANY of the spraying of insecticides ourselves. I even checked city tap water records for Arsenic in the cities where my wife had lived and, for the years where they measured it, it was virtually non-existent.

Also, if farmers in the heartland of America who spray insecticides on acres and acres of crops are not a significant pool of people with Alzheimer's, it does not seem that spraying a few rose bushes could really be the culprit.

Foods:

Here we have to do some serious evaluation of our eating habits.

My wife was a big fan of anything that said "Low Fat" or "Fat Free" on it for years. Little did we realize that most of the food items with those words meant that some man-made chemical concoction was used to make the phony food taste like real food. This was often a chemical soup of trans-fats, artificial sweetners and preservatives.

When you realize that most of these food additives, preservatives and artificial sweeteners have only been in use in the last 30 or 40 years and that the rates of people with some debilitating diseases have increased significantly over the last 30 to 40 years, it's hard not to lean towards a conclusion that there may be some correlation.

There's a good possibility that we have replaced so many natural ingredients in our foods with synthetic ingredients that we have actually become malnourished in specific nutrients that used to be in our diets but that we have engineered out.

Even so-called *vitamins* and *multi-vitamins* are often synthesized chemical concoctions that may bear little resemblance to their natural counterparts. So even though we feed our kids formula and cartoon character chewables, they could be starving for vitamins and minerals that would have been in a natural diet and short-changed the development of natural balance or immune systems that would stop the development of diseases like diabetes, autism, multiple-sclerosis and Alzheimer's.

Maybe we've been doing that long enough that the occurrance of early onset Alzheimer's for baby boomers is at an astounding high.

I began carefully evaluating foods we were consuming. Looking at labels, and looking for *natural* food supplement choices... Trying at nearly all costs to avoid a chemical diet and embrace a *natural* diet.

Such a proliferation of non-natural foods exists that whole store chains have sprouted that claim only to sell natural foods, or have mostly all natural foods. (You've got to read the labels everywhere).

We still eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But the bread is multi-grain, the jelly (or jam) is Smucker's Simply Fruit, and the peanut butter is Laura Scudder's Natural (so what if I have to stir it the first time we open the jar?).

We're careful to use real butter, or butter substitutes with natural oils and flavors. We have nearly eliminated all diet soda and stick with water or Tropicana Fruit Juice (which seems to be OK with 10% real fruit juice for flavor).

Our source of vitamins is from natural sources. I personally like either Lassen's vitamins based out of Ventura, California or Swanson Vitamins, based out of Fargo, North Dakota. For Omega-3 I like Nordic Naturals out of Watsonville, California.

Whether your short-term memory problems are based on factors that can be changed with some detox and vitamins or not, you owe it to yourself to examine what you are or have been consuming.

Picking a Physician: steps to diagnosis

To diagnose Alzheimer's, you'll probably need to consult with more than one source.

In our case, we have an excellent long time family physician, which was our starting point. When it was clear to him that we may need to consult a neurologist, he referred us to one in the same building complex, who ultimately did not work out for us, but he then referred us indirectly to another neurologist who specializes in Alzheimer's, and he was a good match. Dr. William Rodman Shankle, co-author of the book Preventing Alheimer's.


Preventing Alzheimer's
Ways to Help Prevent, Delay Or Halt Alzheimer's
by William Rodman Shankle, Daniel G. Amen - Health & Fitness - 2004


You need to have a physician and a neurologist that you feel comfortable with and has the level of knowledge and concern that will lead to the most compassionate direction for your particular situation. We directed our neurologist to send copies of everything he prescribed and diagnosis to our primary physician so that there would be one central repository. When it came time to justify our situation with insurance companies or the Social Security Administration, this proved to be a brilliant decision, since they could get everything they needed from one source.

A neurologist who is not only familiar with medicines produced by pharmaceutical companies but also clinical trials for new treatments, alternative treatment solutions, and food supplement or nutrient solutions is a must. If your neurologist does not have knowledge in these areas, then he cannot adequately advise or prepare you for what you are going to need to do to fight this disease.

Cognitive testing is a must:

There are a couple of standardized cognitive testing processes used by most legitimate neurologists or clinics to diagnose cognitive challenges in the brain. This can involve 3 to 5 trips to a clinic, usually working with an MD or PHd to do the testing and evaluation, in sessions lasting from 1 to 3 hours. The results of this testing will be helpful not only to you, but to your physician, neurologist and to establish your situation with insurance companies and the Social Security Administration.

Cognitive testing helps to determine the level of cognitive impairment, the areas of the brain that are affected, and (to some degree) the possible cause, which might not be Alzheimer's, but something else, like a mild stroke, a tumor, or other situations.

Scans, Tests and Studies:

Since the problem could be something like a stroke or a brain tumor, it is imperative that the neurologist get a good look at the inside of your head.

We started first with an MRI, then a CAT scan, a Spectroscopy an a Pet Scan. Each of these shows a different level of detail and provides a different perspective of your brain to the technicians and physicians who examine them. Not every physician knows how to interpret what they are seeing in these scans, another good reason to pick highly qualified doctors.

The drugs you are currently taking:

This is key, because your whole problem could be that you are taking a drug for some other ailment that is negatively affecting your brain. Discontinuing that drug, or switching to a different drug to accomplish the same thing in a different way might just solve your whole problem.

Most notably, some blood pressure medications can actually cause symptoms that mimic or exacerbate short term memory loss. Stopping your blood pressure medicine, however, can put you at risk for a stroke, so you don't want to just stop your blood pressure medications without first consulting your physician and possibly substituting a different blood pressure medicine that accomplishes the same task in a different way.

Just as some people are allergic to drugs that other people are not, so too might some people have a reaction or side effect to a medicine that other people do not. So careful attention to medications that you are taking for one ailment could be causing another.

This is true for over-the-counter drugs, and even some food additives or vitamins as well, so if you are consuming a lot of anything in particular, even if it seems innocuous (for example, diet soda or fat-free donuts), consider stopping consumption of those things to see if the problem changes or even goes away. More on this in another post.

For some reason, physicians seem reluctant to stop a drug once they've prescribed it. so take a good look at the drugs you've been prescribed and try to determine if you can actually stop one or more of these drugs.

In the case of my wife, we were able to stop a couple of things she had been taking because the problem for which she was taking the drug had gone away, and did not return when we stopped the drug. It is best to consult a physician before stopping any drug and in some cases you will simply want to scale it down over a couple of weeks instead of stopping cold-turkey.

Alzheimer’s Drug and Vitamin Regimen

Note: This drug and vitamin regimen is informational only, it is the regimen used by a specific individual and should not be construed as a recommended treatment for anyone else. Consult your own physician and neurologist before starting a regimen of your own or for anyone else.

PLEASE ALSO BE AWARE THAT THE FOLLOWING ARE BEING TAKEN IN CONJUNCTION WITH ANOTHER EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENT AND DO NOT REPRESENT THE TOTAL TREATMENT PROGRAM FOR THIS INDIVIDUAL.

Instructions for loading the Pill-Minder trays *

Morning and Evening (am and pm)

• Exelon (2) 9.5mg patches – Anti-Alzheimer’s (with food)
  leave patches on for 48 hours, change patches every 24 hours
  this means there will always be 4 patches on.
  
• Curcumin 1800mg – prevents ALZ *tangles*
• CoQ10 100mg – anti-oxidant/cardio-vascular
• Vitamin E with mixed tocopherols 400iu
• Omega-3 3000mg (3 gels) - anti-oxident/cardio-vascular
• R-Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA) 100mg * - carb metabolism / glucose level
  

Morning Only (am)

• Exelon Patch 4.7mg – Anti-Alzheimer’s 3 hours after morning capsule
• Vitamin C 500mg - with rose hips
• Namenda 20mg – short term memory

Evening Only (pm)

• Vitamin B12 1000mcg – cardio/general health (Shankle)
• Huperzine A 100mcg – cognitive ability
  

* Apex 70059 Twice-a-Day Weekly Pill Organizer (Amazon.com)

SUN pm	MON pm	TUE pm	WED pm	THU pm	FRI pm	SAT pm
SUN am	MON am	TUE am	WED am	THUR am	FRI am	SAT am

Early Signs of Alzheimer's

The early signs of Alzheimer's are, shall we say, hardly worthy of an early diagnosis.

A warning to those reading this... you will find that you have some of these early signs already, no matter who you are or whether you have the disease or not. It's part of what makes the diagnosis of Alzheimer's so difficult.

I can only tell you our own experience, and (to dredge up an old cliché) your mileage may vary.

Everyone experiences the annoying forgetful times once in awhile, where are my glasses, the car keys, etc.. Everyone occasionally loses a train of thought in mid sentence or forgets someone's name at the moment of critical recall. But these are also some of the early signs that somethin' ain't right.

My wife, now age 55 is starting her 3rd year of a battle with Alzheimer's after being diagnosed with it at age 53. Once we had the diagnosis it was easier to look back and identify things that were clues before we even knew she had a problem. They most likely surfaced when she was 52, but were not taken as any serious sign of anything... until they began to affect her work.

Prior to that, however... well, you have to know a bit about her. She has always been a real "people person", well liked, fun loving, athletic tendencies, almost always the team mom on her son's baseball, basketball, soccer and volleyball teams. She was a lay counselor at the church and involved with the church *care team*. Popular since high school, she was not stuck up, not above anyone else, and could get along with just about anyone.

So... she could always tell a story, usually about things that happened to us or the boys, but at some point she began to just start stories... then stop and look at me to finish them. Being no verbal slouch myself, I just took it as a compliment that she thought I could tell it better... and so I happily finished her stories for her. I don't believe anyone thought anything of it.

Before she landed her job working as a Dean's assistant at a local college, we both attended a 12-week course on Microsoft Office. I already knew it pretty well, but you can never know it perfectly, so I took it with her for moral support, and though she wasn't a *power user* by any stretch of the imagination, she worked the lessons on her own and worked them out with just a little help from me. She became, very quickly, proficient at Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, even going on a couple of years later to take another course by herself on Access, the database module of Microsoft Office Pro. She handled complicated scheduling tasks for work, created org charts, wrote documents, handled email and was just all around a good worker and employee. Her bosses gave her high marks on evaluations year after year.

But a few months before her final boss began finding fault with her, she had begun getting confused in our home office when it came to doing some things with the computer. It was just annoying to me and I thought she was just being over emotional and lazy minded when she would ask for help and get teary eyed.

I had no clue what was really going on in her mind.

Though she had loved going to work for several years, she began to dislike it. Then the Dean she had been working for retired and a new Dean became her boss. The previous Deans she had worked for had been great guys. They had both worked their way to the positions they had by merit. This new dean had gotten where she was mostly by manipulation.

This new aggressive and non-forgiving personality proved overwhelming for my wife. And so, when the new boss said, in a non-caring way, that she thought my wife was having short term memory problems... we naturally chalked it up to stress on the job.

I took her to our long time personal physician, who examined her, and noting the high anxiety and stress level, ordered her to take a leave of absence. We all felt that just getting her out of the work environment for a few weeks would let her be herself again.

We were wrong. My wife is and has always been a trooper, after the leave, she was anxious and willing to go back to work. But a couple of days back in the environment was more than she could take. Our physician doubled the leave time and sent us for a preliminary evaluation to a neurologist... who diagnosed her with dementia and prescribed Aricept... and it was just about that impersonal. In fact, that neurologist was so cold and uncaring that my wife never wanted to see him again. I complied.

She went through a third-party, two weekend series of cognitive tests that that neuroligist had prescribed, and got the bad news that she probably was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, a stage sometimes called MCI, or Mild Cognitive Impairment.

It was then that I knew we were in serious trouble.