A New Treatment for Alzheimer's? It Starts With Lifestyle

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A New Treatment for Alzheimer's? It Starts With Lifestyle - Discover Magazine

Armed with big data, researchers turn to customized lifestyle changes to fight the disease.

Sally Weinrich knew something was terribly wrong. On two separate occasions, she forgot to pick up her grandkids from school, and she kept mixing up their names. The 70-year-old retired nursing professor had to face reality. Her worsening symptoms — the forgetfulness and confusion, the difficulties communicating and organizing activities — weren’t just stress or the normal wear and tear of aging. She lived in a matchless setting, on a lake in South Carolina, nestled in a bucolic wood. She swam daily and kayaked three days a week. But even her purposefully healthy lifestyle couldn’t protect her from the darkness she feared most: Alzheimer’s disease.

In 2015, imaging tests revealed the presence of amyloid plaques, the sticky proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease that collect around brain cells and interfere with relaying messages. Weinrich also eventually learned she carried the ApoE4 gene, which increases the odds of developing Alzheimer’s. The disease was diagnosed after a neuropsychological evaluation. “I felt a total sense of hopelessness,” recalls Weinrich, who sank into a deep depression. “I wanted to die.”

Shortly after, her husband heard a radio program about a new treatment regimen devised by physician Dale Bredesen that seemed to reverse early stage Alzheimer’s. The couple contacted the UCLA professor of neurology. Bredesen told them that, based on nearly 30 years of research, he believes Alzheimer’s is triggered by a broad range of factors that upset the body’s natural process of cell turnover and renewal; he didn’t think it emerged from just a handful of rogue genes or plaques spreading across the brain.
 
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