Hope for Alzheimer’s
Every day we hear news of another dementia cure, and it’s a great way to sell newspapers. Beware of junk science that is not peer reviewed. If things like champagne, coffee and chocolate worked, we would not be in the situation we are in!
Nonetheless, hope is an important part of our message as Christians. There is a great deal of work going on towards a cure and there are promising leads.
With the rise of the concept of personalized medicine, a new approach to diagnosis may involve a large battery of tests quantifying everything possible in the body – a person’s individual genome, all fluids, their gut microbiome, and so on. Computer algorithms are then used to calculate what illnesses are occurring or likely to occur, why, and what to do about it. Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology started a company called Arivale to do this work. Dale Bredesen takes a similar approach using a great deal of data, but is focused on dementia. He believes that dementia has as many as 60 causes, and any one person may have 5 or 6 of these factors that need to be addressed. The factors include: genetics, inflammation, immune system, hormonal balance, exposure to toxic metals, gut health, blood brain barrier, body mass index, interference by medications, prediabetes? etc. Bredesen notes that if there are multiple causes and just one cause is “fixed” (e.g. by taking Aricept), then the illness will not subside because there are still other causes. He compares this to a leaky roof with many holes – fixing one hole does not solve the problem.
There are other exciting approaches, for example, Mark Mattson of the National Institute of Aging and Johns Hopkins University is a proponent of exercise and fasting to stave off Alzheimer’s. Suzanne Craft of the University of Washington School of Medicine has intranasal insulin in Phase 3 trails. Jeff Sevigny of Biogen has used the monoclonal antibody Aducanumab to remove plaque; so far this has not coincided with recovered cognition. The drug continues in Phase 3 trials.
Nonetheless, hope is an important part of our message as Christians. There is a great deal of work going on towards a cure and there are promising leads.
With the rise of the concept of personalized medicine, a new approach to diagnosis may involve a large battery of tests quantifying everything possible in the body – a person’s individual genome, all fluids, their gut microbiome, and so on. Computer algorithms are then used to calculate what illnesses are occurring or likely to occur, why, and what to do about it. Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology started a company called Arivale to do this work. Dale Bredesen takes a similar approach using a great deal of data, but is focused on dementia. He believes that dementia has as many as 60 causes, and any one person may have 5 or 6 of these factors that need to be addressed. The factors include: genetics, inflammation, immune system, hormonal balance, exposure to toxic metals, gut health, blood brain barrier, body mass index, interference by medications, prediabetes? etc. Bredesen notes that if there are multiple causes and just one cause is “fixed” (e.g. by taking Aricept), then the illness will not subside because there are still other causes. He compares this to a leaky roof with many holes – fixing one hole does not solve the problem.
There are other exciting approaches, for example, Mark Mattson of the National Institute of Aging and Johns Hopkins University is a proponent of exercise and fasting to stave off Alzheimer’s. Suzanne Craft of the University of Washington School of Medicine has intranasal insulin in Phase 3 trails. Jeff Sevigny of Biogen has used the monoclonal antibody Aducanumab to remove plaque; so far this has not coincided with recovered cognition. The drug continues in Phase 3 trials.