Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - Preventing Alzheimer's is easier than you think.

The "Integrative Medicine" article, found at http://www.mpi-cognition.com/wp-con...01/IMCJ2015.pdf, (thanks, Janet!) provides a very good explanation of Bredesen's protocol and results thus far. Very impressive, and this should not be a surprise to many who have constructed and followed their own LCHF "programs" as the realization must occur that consistency must be adhered to if success is to be the result. Interesting responses by Bredesen regarding the difficulty in following the program. I wonder if the most difficult aspects of this program are the dietary adjustments. Similar to those starting LCHF, the first several months are spent grappling with what to eat, how to eat, and developing a program for consistency, the comments on his patients' results sound very familiar. Here are a couple of relevant quotes from the article:

Quote:

IMCJ: As you mentioned, this is fairly complex and there are many variables, as well as many therapeutic targets in the system. Is the result a protocol that is difficult for patients to adhere to? And as such, does it have to be followed to the letter?
Dr Bredesen:This is a really important point. First of all, this is a different way to do medicine. We are not saying, “Take a pill, then go home and forget it.” It is complex, so what we are saying is, first of all, there is going to be a program. Instead of therapeutics, this is programmatics. I believe that is the future of the treatment of chronic illness: programmatics. Second, this is going to be personalized. This is going to be a program for you based on what is driving your particular problem. Third, of course, now that we are seeing results, we are looking at how we can make this simpler. You have to remember, at the beginning, we did not know what was going to make people better and these were people dying of an untreatable terminal illness.

IMCJ: Would you describe some of the results you have observed from use of the protocol?
Dr Bredesen: There have been about 70 people who have come through now. For example, I just got a call this morning from a man who started a year ago and had a hippocampal volume, before he started the program, quantified at less than the 20th percentile. It is now greater than the 75th percentile. He actually could not believe that his own hippocampus had gotten larger. He asked the MRI technicians, “Can you give me an explanation for that?” The guy said, “I don’t understand it. I can’t offer you an explanation.”

This patient, by the way, was at a point where he was going to have to quit his job. He is doing very well at his job now, continuing to do his job very effectively. We have another person who is over 3 years out now, still back to work full-time and doing very, very well. We have had a couple of people now who have gone on and off the program a couple of times, either because of traveling, stressful things in their lives, running out of some of the components, or getting ill and not being able to take some of the components.

They have shown very clearly that when they get off the program, they get worse; then when they go back on the program, they get better again. That supports the idea that the program is actually helping them.

It's striking how many of these comments about adapting to and sticking with the program are familiar to the LCHF experiences of many expressed on this forum. The main takeaway for me is that following a sound nutritional program reverses many Metabolic Syndrome conditions including the prevention or avoidance of many that have yet to manifest themselves such as Alzheimer's. I'm hopeful that this protocol is the tip of the iceberg of new medical approaches to many diseases. Developing a holistic program to address root cause by including dietary and nutritional strategies is paramount, and unfortunately, not the current strategy of most doctors today. This extremely important information must be studied further and actively shared.