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by Dr. Mark Hyman
Dementia on the Rise
'Dementia is a big problem and growing every day. Ten percent of 65-year olds, 25 percent of 75-year olds, and 50 percent of 85-year olds will get Alzheimer's disease -- at a cost of $60 billion a year to society. Worse, the number of people with Alzheimer's is predicted to triple in the next few decades. It is now the seventh leading cause of death.
I believe this preventable, that we can slow this trend and even reverse it. In a moment, I will tell you how. But first I want to explain why just naming a disease -- whether it is dementia or anything else -- is becoming increasingly unhelpful (unless you just want to match the drug to the disease which is the only thing doctors are trained to do).
We have to think about individuals, not diseases. In medicine, our genetic differences are more important than our similarities.'
Big Pharma is Not Interested in Helping People!'Given a worst-case scenario, the principals of Medivation have made themselves rich, even if they never produce a single product. If they do, then they'll become fabulously rich—even if their products produce only marginal benefits or do significant harm. Their positions within the corporation insulate them from most risk—a significantly different position from those who take their products in the hope of gaining some marginal benefit.
Think about it: The excitement over Dimebon relates to an improvement of 1.3 points over other drugs on a scale of 0-70 in the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale, cognitive section—and there's no indication of arresting the disease.
For, at best, minimal benefit to patients, a small number of people who know how to play the system are, at a minimum, raking in millions on the hope of achieving that small gain. If they hit the jackpot, they stand to see profits in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Quite a scam, isn't it?'
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By: Dr. William Wong, ND, PhD.'Look at an MRI of an Alzheimers patient’s brain and what will you see? You'll see a shrunken mass looking something like an over-cooked baked potato; dry looking with fissures and cracks, not at all like the image of the big juicy brain we know with it's swirls and convolutions. What happened? How did it get that way? Is there any way to avoid or even reverse some of the damage?
'Alzheimers in a way is an accelerated and more serious form of the brain degeneration we'll all be subject to as we age. Let me explain the physiological process. From 27 onward our bodies begin the aging process. In this process, various things happen to slowly limit the function of our internal organs not the least of which is that the organs themselves, including the brain, begin to be laced through with scar tissue (fibrosis) and shrink.
'From 40-45 onward our brains not only shrink due to fibrosis but hormone changes (i.e. a drop in testosterone) also decrease the size of a portion of the brain known as the medical amygdala. Cells in the substancia negra of the brain which controls our brains connection to the body, begin to die off and with it the production of dopamine, the chemical needed for the brain body connection, begins to wane.
'If these cells die off too quickly or at too young an age that produces Parkinson's disease. If they die off slowly, as is normal, we gradually become weaker and less precise in our movements over time and our libido is lacking or gone altogether. Soy foods have been found to increase the brain shrinkage. (See our article Soy The Poison Seed for references).'
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