Alzheimer's Disease Quotes

I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer's disease where they slowly began to recover other people's lost memories.

Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn't know possible.

I dreamed I saw my maternal grandmother sitting by the bank of a swimming pool, that was also a river. In real life, she had been a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and had regressed, before her death, to a semi-conscious state. In the dream, as well, she had lost her capacity for self-control. Her genital region was exposed, dimly; it had the appearance of a thick mat of hair. She was stroking herself, absent-mindedly. She walked over to me, with a handful of pubic hair, compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush. She pushed this at my face. I raised my arm, several times, to deflect her hand; finally, unwilling to hurt her, or interfere with her any farther, I let her have her way. She stroked my face with the brush, gently, and said, like a child, “isn’t it soft?” I looked at her ruined face and said, “yes, Grandma, it’s soft.

In the heart or every caregiver is a knowing that we are all connected. As I do for you, I do for me.

The Statue of Liberty, that frequently malevolent bitch, has an enormous tumor in her gut that has spread to her brain and eyes. With regard to the Native Americans she has Alzheimer's or mad cow disease and can't remember her past, and her blind eyes can't see the terrifying plight of most of the Indian tribes. Meanwhile she blows China and stomps Cuba to death, choosing to forget the Native cultures she has already destroyed.

She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.

Dr. Cai Song is an internationally known researcher at the University of British Columbia and co-author of a recent textbook, Fundamentals of Psychoneuroimmunology. “I am convinced that Alzheimer’s is an autoimmune disease,” says Dr. Song. “It is probably triggered by chronic stress acting on an aging immune system.

A nation which fails to adequately remember salient points of its own history, is like a person with Alzheimer's. And that can be a social disease of a most destructive nature.

Excess cholesterol in the blood can lead to excess cholesterol in the brain, which may then help trigger the clumping of amyloid seen in Alzheimer’s brains. Under an electron microscope, we can see the clustering of amyloid fibers on and around tiny crystals of cholesterol.

She almost thought she'd said the words aloud, but she hadn't. They remained trapped in her head, but not because they were barricaded by plaques and tangles. She just couldn't say them aloud

Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She's said a tearful good-bye to okay some time ago.

Accepting the fact that she did indeed have Alzheimer's, that she could only bank on two unacceptably effective drugs available to treat it, and that she couldn't trade any of this in for some other, curable disease, what did she want? Assuming the in vitro procedure worked, she wanted to live to hold Anna's baby and know it was her grandchild. She wanted to see Lydia act in something she was proud of. She wanted to see Tom fall in love. She wanted one more sabbatical year with John. She wanted to read every book she could before she could no longer read. She laughed a little, surprised at what she'd just revealed about herself. Nowhere in that list was anything about linguistics, teaching, or Harvard. She ate her last bite of cone. She wanted more sunny, seventy-degree days and ice-cream cones.

The single most powerful item in our preventive tool kit is exercise, which has a two-pronged impact on Alzheimer’s disease risk: it helps maintain glucose homeostasis, and it improves the health of our vasculature

It's like you don't get that she's not gone yet, like you think her time left isn't meaningful anymore. You're acting like a selfish child.

I miss myself." "I miss you too, Ali, so much." "I never planned to get like this." "I know.

Caffeine dehydrates the brain and body.

Dying from an aggressive fatal brain tumor is like dying from Alzheimer's disease accelerated one hundred times.

They talked about her as if she weren’t sitting in the wing chair, a few feet away. They talked about her, in front of her, as if she were deaf. They talked about her, in front of her, without including her, as if she had Alzheimer’s disease.

While the pathology of stroke and Alzheimer’s are different, one key factor unites them: Mounting evidence suggests that a healthy diet may help prevent them both.

I am daily learning To be the reluctant guardian of your memories There was light in those eyes; I miss that

The simplest way to look at all these associations, between obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and Alzheimer's (not to mention the other the conditions that also associate with obesity and diabetes, such as gout, asthma, and fatty liver disease), is that what makes us fat - the quality and quantity of carbohydrates we consume - also makes us sick.

From this cascade comes a prediction: getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Precisely this relationship has now been reported in numerous epidemiological studies, including those individuals suffering from sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea.VIII Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night—both went on to develop the ruthless disease. The current US president, Donald Trump—also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night—may want to take note.

SUICIDE IS NOW – in places including the UK and US – a leading cause of death, accounting for over one in a hundred fatalities. According to figures from the World Health Organization, it kills more people than stomach cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, colon cancer, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s. As people who kill themselves are, more often than not, depressives, depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It kills more people than most other forms of violence – warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, gun crime – put together.

But Marisa already knew the answer and it was too late for recrimination. The chance of even a rational discussion of the problem was forever shut out of Mama’s brain. A brutal bastard was steadily sucking the intelligence and the very life from the mother who had once been witty, wise and loving. The scourge had a name Marisa had come to equate with hell: Alzheimer’s Disease.

The most mind-blowing results concern the aging process. People with a more positive attitude to their later years are less likely to develop hearing loss, frailty, and illness—and even Alzheimer’s disease—than people who associate aging with senility and disability. In a very real sense, we are as young as we feel inside.

Alzheimer's... It is a barren disease, as empty and lifeless as a desert. It is a thief of hearts and souls and memories.

If Alzheimer's disease only destroyed our unhappy memories, would we race for a cure?

I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas – these seem to me to be immense blessings.

That whole year, Jude had read every book she could find on Alzheimer's disease. She studied the illness desperately, as if understanding it would make any difference. It didn't, of course.

The pineal gland is activated by light and controls the body's bio- rhythms in concert with the hypothalamus gland which regulates hunger, thirst, sexual desire and the biological clock that dictates how fast we age. Look at the potential for mass control if you can externally suppress and manipulate the pineal and hypothalamus glands alone. You can make it much harder to perceive beyond the five senses, decide how quickly people age, how much they want sex, when they are hungry and thirsty and for how long. This is the key reason for putting sodium fluoride into water supplies and toothpaste. The pineal gland absorbs more fluoride than any other part of the body and becomes calcified by this highly-damaging toxin. Sodium fluoride is an appalling waste product of the aluminum industry and has been used in rat poison. It causes cancer, genetic damage, Alzheimer's disease, disrupts the endocrine system and dumbs down the brain. It was added to drinking water in the Nazi concentration camps to make the inmates more acquiescent and docile.

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world’s leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals), if an individual has had five consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the years studied) his/her chances of getting Alzheimer’s Disease is ten times higher than if they had one, two or no shots. I asked Dr. Fudenberg why this was so and he said it was due to the mercury and aluminum that is in every flu shot (and most childhood shots). The gradual mercury and aluminum buildup in the brain causes cognitive dysfunction. Is that why Alzheimer’s is expected to quadruple?219

Overstimulation of IGF-1-signaling pathways in the brain due to milk consumption could thus accelerate the onset of neurodegenerative disease. IGF-1 passes the blood-brain barrier and reaches the neurons in the brain.

So many modern diseases, including heart disease, depression, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and all the autoimmune diseases (such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus), occur in part because our body’s immune systems produce excess chronic inflammation. In chronic inflammation, the immune system stays on too long and may even begin to attack the body’s own tissues, as though they were outside invaders. The causes of chronic inflammation are many, including diet and, of course, the countless chemical toxins that become embedded in the body. Chronically inflamed bodies produce chemicals, called pro-inflammatory cytokines, which contribute to pain and inflammation.

And if, despite all this, you are someday diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, there are three lessons I’ve learned from my grandmother and Greg and the dozens of other people I’ve come to know living with this disease: Diagnosis

This disease will not be bargained with. I can’t offer it the names of the United States presidents in exchange for the names of my children. I can’t give it the names of the state capitals and keep the memories of my husband.

With diets Westernizing globally, Alzheimer’s rates are expected to continue to increase, writes one researcher in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, “unless dietary patterns change to those with less reliance on animal products.…

Twenty years of medical research has shown that childhood adversity literally gets under our skin, changing people in ways that can endure in their bodies for decades. It can tip a child’s developmental trajectory and affect physiology. It can trigger chronic inflammation and hormonal changes that can last a lifetime. It can alter the way DNA is read and how cells replicate, and it can dramatically increase the risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes—even Alzheimer’s.

But you can see it, Harriet, a look in his eyes, an alertness, as if somewhere behind the disease, behind the scar tissue, behind the fog of disassociation, Bernard is all there, he's just lost his ability to communicate. Like somebody turned off his volume. You're certain he can see everything that is transpiring with crystal clarity, and he can't do a goddamn thing about it.

An apple a day might have kept the doctor away prior to the industrialization of food growing and preparation. But, according to research compiled by the United States Drug Administration (USDA) today’s apple contains residue of eleven different neurotoxins—azinphos, methyl chloripyrifos, diazinon, dimethoate, ethion, omthoate, parathion, parathion methyl, phosalone, and phosmet — and the USDA was testing for only one category of chemicals known as organophosphate insecticides. That doesn’t sound too appetizing does it? The average apple is sprayed with pesticides seventeen times before it is harvested.

In her scorching memoir, Keeper, about the two years she lived with her mother-in-law and her rapidly worsening Alzheimer's disease, Andrea Gillies asks, 'What it is that dementia takes away?' And she answers herself: 'Everything; every last thing we reassure ourselves that nothing could take away from us.

Sturtevant’s rudimentary genetic map would foreshadow the vast and elaborate efforts to map genes along the human genome in the 1990s. By using linkage to establish the relative positions of genes on chromosomes, Sturtevant would also lay the groundwork for the future cloning of genes tied to complex familial diseases, such as breast cancer, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. In about twelve hours, in an undergraduate dorm room in New York, he had poured the foundation for the Human Genome Project.

Physical exercise is the fountain of youth; it’s critical to keeping your brain vibrant and young. If you want to attack Alzheimer’s disease, depression, obesity, and aging all at once, move every day. In fact exercise is one of the most powerful antiaging tools, and it directly fights depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

They think I don't know what I'm thinking, but I do.

One goal of the mindful caregiver is to find ways to not feel ‘dis-eased’ in the caregiving process.

You heard that here first: Mercury is 100 percent responsible for Alzheimer’s disease. You will never in your lifetime hear the truth about that anywhere else.

Antes de los 30 años, los hombres buscan la enfermedad; después de los 30, la enfermedad busca a los hombres. Proverbio chino

Age On Purpose. Be intentional in your journey. You define aging. Don't allow aging to define you. It renders helplessness.

No disease should be allowed to have as its victims both the patient and the caregiver. But that is exactly what is happening every minute of every day. I

Being strong alone everyone shall be but being strong in front of the crowd, only a strong heart and strong brain shall be

Even gene variants implicated in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s may have benefits: E. S. Lander, “Brave New Genome,” New England Journal of Medicine 373 (2015): 5–8.

Holding hands, hugging, or just sitting companionably together is an important way to continue to communicate.

Irish Alzheimer’s, a disease where everything is forgotten except a grudge.

In his TED talk about sleep, Dr. Jeff Iliff of Oregon Health and Science University takes the “laundry cycle” metaphor even further. He notes that, while we’re awake, the brain is so busy doing other things that it doesn’t have the capacity to clean itself of waste. The buildup of this waste, amyloid-beta, is now being linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer's is not about the past - the successes, the accolades, the accomplishments. They offer only context and are worthless on places like Pluto. Alzheimer's is about the present and the struggle, the scrappy brawl, the fight to live with a disease. It's being in the present, the relationships, the experiences, which is the core of life, the courage to live in the soul.

Elevated blood sugar stirs up inflammation in the bloodstream, as excess sugar can be toxic if it’s not swept up and used by cells. It also triggers a reaction called glycation—the biological process by which sugar binds to proteins and certain fats, resulting in deformed molecules that don’t function well. These sugar proteins are technically called advanced glycation end products (AGEs). The body does not recognize AGEs as normal, so they set off inflammatory reactions. In the brain, sugar molecules and brain proteins combine to produce lethal new structures that contribute to the degeneration of the brain and its functioning. The relationship between poor blood sugar control and Alzheimer’s disease in particular is so strong that researchers are now calling Alzheimer’s disease type-3 diabetes.14

She could always walk somewhere without him. Of course this somewhere had to be somewhere "safe." She could walk to her office. But she didn't want to go to her office. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her office. She felt ridiculous there. She didn't belong there anymore. In all the expansive grandeur that was Harvard, there wasn't room there for a cognitive psychology professor with a broken cognitive psyche.

different parts of the brain as it thinks. By tracing the path taken by our thoughts, MRI scans have shed new light into the nature of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, and a host of other mental diseases.

Alzheimer’s is an enormous, uncontrollable, expensive disease with the power to overwhelm an individual or family with the stereotype that nothing can be done to make it easier, but we know that this is not true.

I have come to see that the benefits produced by eating a plant-based diet are far more diverse and impressive than any drug or surgery used in medical practice. Heart diseases, cancers, diabetes, stroke and hypertension, arthritis, cataracts, Alzheimer’s disease, impotence and all sorts of other chronic diseases can be largely prevented. These diseases, which generally occur with aging and tissue degeneration, kill the majority of us before our time.

I should also add something about weight here, because we all know that there’s often a relationship between weight and risk for diabetes. If the risk for Alzheimer’s disease goes up with metabolic disorders, then it makes sense that the risk also rises with unhealthy weight gain that has metabolic consequences. The science now speaks to this fact. Carrying extra weight around the abdomen has been shown to be particularly harmful to the brain. One study that garnered lots of media attention looked at over six thousand individuals aged forty to forty-five and measured the size of their bellies between 1964 and 1973.11 A few decades later, they were evaluated to see who had developed dementia and how that related to their waist size at the start of the study. The correlation between risk of dementia and thicker midsections twenty-seven years earlier was remarkable: Those with the highest level of abdominal fat had an increased risk of dementia of almost three-fold in comparison to those with the lowest abdominal weight. There is plenty of evidence that managing your weight now will go a long way toward preventing brain decline later.

Some older or very ill patients may not be suitable candidates for fecal transfer. Colonoscopy is an invasive procedure, especially for those patients who are too ill with other conditions like cancer, heart failure, dialysis, or Alzheimer’s.

It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer's disease, you would never get to the solution. But the answer to Alzheimer's disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it's a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.

Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, memory loss, and neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and ALS can all be prevented by fruit. That’s because not only does fruit prevent these diseases, it prevents oxidation—which is the process that ages us. It

As the dementia progresses and the person develops trouble with coordination and language, it is easy to forget his need to experience pleasant things and to enjoy himself. Never overlook the importance of hand holding, touching, hugging, and loving.

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty. I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.

Your waist size is such an important predictor of health because the type of fat that is stored around your waistline—called “visceral fat” or “belly fat”—is related to the release of proteins and hormones that cause inflammation, which can in turn damage your arteries and affect how you metabolize sugars and fats. For this reason, visceral fat is strongly linked to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and other chronic diseases. Seeing your waist size come down is a great indicator of improving health.

Cancer is not the only brain disease being targeted for treatment with living cells. Cell therapy also has the potential to replace aging or injured tissue. In this hope for regenerative medicine, modified stem cells are being studied as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

He was having one of those lucid moments that make you, as a loved one of an Alzheimer's victim, forget for a minute or two that this is all really happening. You can forget about the disease and its toll and confusion and suddenly engage with the same person with whom you conversed profoundly for so many years, until it all started to go haywire. In that moment I wanted to know what I think so many Alzheimer's caregivers crave to understand: Do you know what has become of you? Can you, so lucid now, see how you act when you are not like you are now? Does it make you sad? Does it make you ashamed? The reprieve right there at the red light was momentary, even illusory. But there for the taking, right in front of me--so obvious that I almost panicked over what to talk about. Do we discuss his beloved baseball? His beloved grandchildren? Me--how I'm doing, how much I miss him? No. As much out of curiosity as concern, I wanted to talk about him. "Dad," I said, "you are losing your mind. You know that. How does that make you feel? How are you doing with that?" "I'm doing the best I can with what God has given me," he said.

She glanced over her shoulder one more time and saw her mum turn to Brenda. In a very loud whisper, she heard her mum say, ‘She’s pretty. Who is that lady that just left?’ She smiled a sad smile. Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease, but you had to embrace it instead of fighting it to get through.

The population with the highest rate of the “Alzheimer’s gene” has one of the lowest rates of Alzheimer’s disease? This contradiction may be explained by Nigerians’ extremely low blood-cholesterol levels, thanks to a diet low in animal fat104 and consisting mainly of grains and vegetables.105 So, it

By 1993 Murdoch was becoming reluctant to engage in public activities and dreaded giving interviews. These late letters increasingly evidence the language difficulties and amnesia that, in retrospect, suggest the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, although the condition remained undiagnosed until 1997.

Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn is more optimistic and says, "Every sign, including genetics, says there's some causality [between telomeres] and the nasty things that happen with aging." She notes that there is a direct link between the shortened telomeres and certain diseases. For example, if you have shortened telomeres- if your telomeres are in the bottom third of the population in terms of length-then your risk of cardiovascular disease is 40 percent greater. "Telomere shortening," she concludes, "seems to underlie the risks for the diseases that kill you...heart disease, diabetes, cancer, even Alzheimer's.

But we can't do anything about getting older. If we live long enough, is forgetting due to Alzheimer's our brain's destiny? For most of us, it is not. Alzheimer's is not a part of normal aging. Only 2% of people with Alzheimer's have the purely inherited early-onset form of the disease. 98% of the time, Alzheimer's is caused by a combination of the genes we inherited and how we live. While we can't do anything about our DNA, science clearly shows that the way we live can dramatically affect the accumulation of amyloid plaques. This in turn means that, like cancer and heart disease, there are things we can do to prevent Alzheimer's.

the answer to Alzheimer’s disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it’s a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.

Perhaps there is something within the genetic make-up of specific individuals which predisposes them to accumulate and retain aluminium in their brain, as is similarly suggested for individuals with familial Alzheimer’s disease. The new evidence strongly suggests that aluminium is entering the brain in ASD via pro-inflammatory cells which have become loaded up with aluminium in the blood and/or lymph, much as has been demonstrated for monocytes at injection sites for vaccines including aluminium adjuvants. Perhaps we now have the putative link between vaccination and ASD, the link being the inclusion of an aluminium adjuvant in the vaccine.

Parts of the book describe work carried out in my own laboratory, and these studies have been made possible by funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein Fund, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Adler Foundation.

Having greater self-esteem Looking better in jeans or a bathing suit Being able to participate in sports and other activities I used to enjoy Having a better relationship with my spouse Reversing diabetes, heart disease, or other health risks Decreasing my risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other diseases of aging Having the confidence to apply for the job I really want

People with Parkinson’s are very lucky to have L-dopa. There is no equivalent therapy for other neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Whatever its limitations, L-dopa turned Parkinson’s from a condition in which victims experienced a rapid slide toward immobility and death into a chronic disease with a gradual trajectory of decline. A

By far the most important fat for brain energy utilization is beta-hydroxybutyrate (beta-HBA), and we’ll explore this unique fat in more detail in the next chapter. This is why the so-called ketogenic diet has been a treatment for epilepsy since the early 1920s and is now being reevaluated as a very powerful therapeutic option in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease,

Every woman I'd ever known had two sets of memories: the one they wanted to remember and the one their heart wouldn't let them forget. The first kind were chosen, mostly positive and personality building, but the second would live on forever, despite age and fatigue and life-stealing diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's. Coded on the heart like a hard drive, the feelings never vanished.

WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE HEART IS GOOD FOR THE BRAIN. That is, vascular health (meaning low apoB, low inflammation, and low oxidative stress) is crucial to brain health. WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE LIVER (AND PANCREAS) IS GOOD FOR THE BRAIN. Metabolic health is crucial to brain health. TIME IS KEY. We need to think about prevention early, and the more the deck is stacked against you genetically, the harder you need to work and the sooner you need to start. As with cardiovascular disease, we need to play a very long game. OUR MOST POWERFUL TOOL FOR PREVENTING COGNITIVE DECLINE IS EXERCISE. We’ve talked a lot about diet and metabolism, but exercise appears to act in multiple ways (vascular, metabolic) to preserve brain health; we’ll get into more detail in Part III, but exercise—lots of it—is a foundation of our Alzheimer’s-prevention program.

Science is being corrupted by the influence of corporate money. This corruption is leading directly to our poor health, whether it be the epidemic of obesity; neurological diseases like autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis; the explosion of cancers; or mental problems among the young, including school shooters. There are some who claim this is leading to a culling, if not the mass extinction, of humanity.

What they found was striking: higher levels of the inactive form of IRS-1 (signifying impaired insulin signaling in the brain) predicted Alzheimer’s disease development in patients with 100 percent accuracy.20 Even more breathtaking, the difference in these blood markers was evident ten years prior to the emergence of symptoms. This suggests that maintaining the brain’s insulin sensitivity throughout life may be a major step toward preventing the disease.

The Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay diet—or MIND diet, for short—was specially designed to improve brain health. Recent well-done studies have found that sticking to the MIND diet helps people avoid mental decline and remain cognitively healthy. One study even showed that people who stuck to the MIND diet cut their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in half. That’s extraordinary. And since no drug has yet been developed to prevent dementia, it’s your only move.

Since 2005, researchers have been finding correlations between diabetes and risk for Alzheimer’s disease, especially when the diabetes is not controlled and a person suffers from chronic high blood sugar.7 Some have gone so far as to refer to Alzheimer’s disease as “type 3 diabetes,” because the disease often involves a disrupted relationship with insulin, the metabolic hormone involved in both types 1 and 2 diabetes. Insulin is the hormone needed to deliver sugar (glucose) into cells for use.

One of the key reasons that rates of dementia have fallen sharply since the 1970s is the advent of improved treatments for heart ailments. What’s good for the heart is actually very good for the brain. The steps you take to keep your heart arteries unclogged also keep brain arteries open. Cholesterol-lowering drugs have dramatically reduced coronary artery disease and are effective even in people who live sedentary lifestyles and eat foods that aren’t “heart healthy.” Statins, prescribed to lower cholesterol, have lately been shown to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in most people.

ASPARTAME AND MSG: EXCITOTOXINS Aspartame is, in fact, an excitotoxin, one of a group of substances, usually acidic amino acids, that in high amounts react with specialized receptors in the brain, causing destruction of certain types of neurons. A growing number of neurosurgeons and neurologists are convinced that excitotoxins play a critical role in the development of several neurological disorders, including migraines, seizures, learning disorders in children, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).1 Glutamate and aspartate are two powerful amino acids that act as neurotransmitters in the brain in very small concentrations, but they are also commonly available in food additives. Glutamate is in MSG, a flavor enhancer, and in hydrolyzed vegetable protein, found in hundreds of processed foods. Aspartate is one of three components of aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal), a sugar substitute. In higher concentrations as food additives, these chemicals constantly stimulate brain cells and can cause them to undergo a process of cell death known as excitotoxicity—the cells are excited to death.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, old age was defined as sixty-five years, yet estimated life expectancy in the United States at the time was sixty-one years for males and sixty-four years for females.62 A senior citizen today, however, can expect to live eighteen to twenty years longer. The downside is that he or she also should expect to die more slowly. The two most common causes of death in 1935 America were respiratory diseases (pneumonia and influenza) and infectious diarrhea, both of which kill rapidly. In contrast, the two most common causes of death in 2007 America were heart disease and cancer (each accounted for about 25 percent of total deaths). Some heart attack victims die within minutes or hours, but most elderly people with heart disease survive for years while coping with complications such as high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, general weakness, and peripheral vascular disease. Many cancer patients also remain alive for several years following their diagnosis because of chemo-therapy, radiation, surgery, and other treatments. In addition, many of the other leading causes of death today are chronic illnesses such as asthma, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, and kidney disease, and there has been an upsurge in the occurrence of nonfatal but chronic illnesses such as osteoarthritis, gout, dementia, and hearing loss.63 Altogether, the growing prevalence of chronic illness among middle-aged and elderly individuals is contributing to a health-care crisis because the children born during the post–World War II baby boom are now entering old age, and an unprecedented percentage of them are suffering from lingering, disabling, and costly diseases. The term epidemiologists coined for this phenomenon is the “extension of morbidity.

Until the early years of the twenty-first century, no one knew that bones produced hormones at all, but then a geneticist at Columbia University Medical Center, Gerard Karsenty, realized that osteocalcin, which is produced in bones, not only is a hormone but seems to be involved in a large number of important regulatory activities across the body, from helping to manage glucose levels to boosting male fertility to influencing our moods and keeping our memory in working order. Apart from anything else, it could help to explain the long-standing mystery of how regular exercise helps to stave off Alzheimer’s disease: exercise builds stronger bones and stronger bones produce more osteocalcin.

How often are people told they’ve brought a condition like depression upon themselves? It’s all part of mercury’s blame-the-victim game. Those depressive symptoms are the mercury speaking for the patient without her or his consent. Sometimes mercury moves past the hostage phase and takes someone out, resulting in death by Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, or stroke. It’s that serious. Mercury has injured or killed well over a billion people. No one likes Alzheimer’s; it’s a frightening, terrible disease. Yet it’s rapidly becoming common—and it’s 100 percent mercury-caused. You heard that here first: Mercury is 100 percent responsible for Alzheimer’s disease. You will never in your lifetime hear the truth about that anywhere else.

Consider this scenario: A man gets a stomachache after each meal. To “treat” this problem, he takes (either by prescription or by self-medication) some antacid or other nostrum. Then he gets a headache (which may or may not be a side effect of the stomach medication); to “treat” the headache he takes aspirin, which further irritates his stomach. Three years later he develops an ulcer, for which he takes another medication, plus large amounts of milk and cream (although an outmoded treatment, it is still being used today). Meanwhile, he is still taking antacids for his indigestion and eating the same way he always had. Eventually, he has an operation to remove his ulcer. He continues with his high-dairy diet. Soon thereafter he develops arteriosclerosis and high blood pressure and begins to take antihypertensive medication. The side effects of the latter include headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, diarrhea, slow heart rate, mental confusion, hallucinations, weight gain, and impotence. When his wife leaves him for a younger man, he takes antidepressants and sleeping pills. He has a heart attack and undergoes an operation to repair a heart valve. Painkillers keep him going as he slowly recuperates. A year or two later, he finds himself with an irreversible neurological disease such as ALS or Alzheimer’s, and he wonders what could have gone wrong. All that’s left for him to do is wait to die, which he can do in a nursing home, drugged into complaisance and painlessness.

As devasting as it is, cirrhosis is not the only end point I’m worried about here. I care about NAFLD and NASH — and you should too — because they represent the tip of the iceberg of a global epidemic of metabolic disorders, ranging from insulin resistance to type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is technically a distinct disease, defined very clearly by glucose metrics, but I view it as simply the last stop on a railway line passing through several other stations, including hyperinsulinemia, prediabetes, and NAFLD/NASH. If you find yourself anywhere on this train line, even in the early stages of NAFLD, you are likely also en route to one or more of the three Horsemen diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease). As we will see in the next few chapters, metabolic dysfunction vastly increases your risks for all of these.

Wandering has long been seen as part of the pathology of dementia. Doctors, carers, and relatives often try to stop patients from venturing out alone, out of concern they will injure themselves, or won’t remember the way back. When a person without dementia goes for a walk, it is called going for a stroll, getting some fresh air, or exercising, anthropologist Maggie Graham observes in her recent paper. When a person with dementia goes for a walk beyond prescribed parameters, it is typically called wandering, exit-seeking, or elopement. Yet wandering may not be so much a part of the disease as a therapeutic response to it. Even though dementia and Alzheimer’s in particular can cause severe disorientation, Graham says the desire to walk should be desire to be alive and to grow, as opposed to as a product of disease and deterioration. Many in the care profession share her view. The Alzheimer’s Society, the UK’s biggest dementia supportive research charity, considers wandering an unhelpful description, because it suggests aimlessness, whereas the walking often has a purpose. The charity lists several possible reasons why a person might feel compelled to move. They may be continuing the habit of a lifetime; they may be bored, restless, or agitated; they may be searching for a place or a person from their past that they believe to be close by; or maybe they started with a goal in mind, forgot about it, and just kept going. It is also possible that they are walking to stay alive. Sat in a chair in a room they don’t recognise, with a past they can’t access, it can be a struggle to know who they are. But when they move they are once again wayfinders, engaging in one of the oldest human endeavours, and anything is possible.

Specifically, damage to the left hemisphere can free up the creative capabilities of the right hemisphere. More generally, when one neural circuit in the brain is turned off, another circuit, which was inhibited by the inactivated circuit, may turn on. Scientists have also uncovered some surprising links between disorders that appear to be unrelated because they are characterized by dramatically different kinds of behavior. Several disorders of movement and of memory, such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, result from misfolded proteins. The symptoms of these disorders vary widely because the particular proteins affected and the functions for which they are responsible differ. Similarly, both autism and schizophrenia involve synaptic pruning, the removal of excess dendrites on neurons. In autism, not enough dendrites are pruned, whereas in schizophrenia too many are.

Huperzia serrata   Native to India and Southeast Asia, the Huperzia serrata is also called firmoss. It is used in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine as medicinal plants to treat different types of maladies. In recent studies, researchers have found out that it contains neuro-protective properties.   Benefits   Unlike other medicinal herbs in Asia, Huperzia serrata is not as common in Western folk medicine. This particular herb contains the compound called huperzine A which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor and NMDA receptor antagonist. Below are the benefits of using this medicinal herb.   It is used to improve the brain and cognitive function.   It can also help prevent the occurrence of autoimmune neuromuscular diseases that can lead to muscle weakness and disability.   It has the potential of treating patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.   How to Use   This particular medicinal herb is prepared as tea or infusion. However, there are also dietary supplements available from the market that you can take.

— The opening argument was one of Devlin-Brown’s favorite parts of a trial. In a case like this, it was sometimes all that mattered. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had a formula for it, a system that was passed down through generations of prosecutors. It started with what they called “the grab”—a quick, two-minute summary of the case, meant to capture the jury’s attention. The grab could begin in one of two ways. The first was with a big thematic idea, as in, “This is a case about greed.” Devlin-Brown preferred what he called the “It was a dark and stormy night” beginning, which dropped the jurors right into a dramatic scene. Just like in a movie. On this day, his version began with, “It was July of 2008.” He spoke in a gentle, even voice. “Mathew Martoma, the defendant, was one of about a thousand people packed into a crowded Chicago convention hall waiting for an expert on Alzheimer’s disease to take the stage.” Sidney Gilman, he explained, was at an international Alzheimer’s conference to unveil the results of a hotly anticipated drug trial. The results of

Alzheimer’s disease, which is associated with the production and accumulation of amyloid-β in the brain. That means he has serious neural damage all over the brain. While for the past twenty years or so amyloid has been considered the “cause” of Alzheimer’s, there is recent evidence against that hypothesis, and others are being entertained.1 At any rate, the disease results in the slow destruction of the brain, commencing particularly with the loss of neurons in the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus, resulting in short-term memory loss. The disease can become so debilitating that it can completely reshape Grandpa’s personality, transforming him from a lively and caring person into a listless shell of his former self. Yet, though he may not recognize me, he is still cognizant of social niceties and shakes my hand. He may wander off, but he will still feel fear when confused and lost, and anger when frustrated. His conscious experience of the world is brought to him through whatever operational neural circuitry continues to function, and as he loses function, it becomes more restricted. The contents of that conscious experience most likely are odd, very different from those of the normal brain or his past self. As a result, odd behavior follows.

Here’s how I’ve always pictured mitigated free will: There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brainspecific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book. And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview—seizures blow the homunculus’s fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock. There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente—for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot. But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science. That’s what mitigated free will is about. I see incredibly smart people recoil from this and attempt to argue against the extremity of this picture rather than accept its basic validity: “You’re setting up a straw homunculus, suggesting that I think that other than the likes of seizures or brain injuries, we are making all our decisions freely. No, no, my free will is much softer and lurks around the edges of biology, like when I freely decide which socks to wear.” But the frequency or significance with which free will exerts itself doesn’t matter. Even if 99.99 percent of your actions are biologically determined (in the broadest sense of this book), and it is only once a decade that you claim to have chosen out of “free will” to floss your teeth from left to right instead of the reverse, you’ve tacitly invoked a homunculus operating outside the rules of science. This is how most people accommodate the supposed coexistence of free will and biological influences on behavior. For them, nearly all discussions come down to figuring what our putative homunculus should and shouldn’t be expected to be capable of.

We have a crisis in this nation, and it has nothing to do with regulatory reform or marginal tax rates. This book is not going to be about politics. (Sorry to disappoint.) It’s about something deeper and more meaningful. Something a little harder to quantify but a lot more personal. Despite the astonishing medical advances and technological leaps of recent years, average life span is in decline in America for the third year in a row. This is the first time our nation has had even a two-year drop in life expectancy since 1962—when the cause was an influenza epidemic. Normally, declines in life expectancy are due to something big like that—a war, or the return of a dormant disease. But what’s the “big thing” going on in America now? What’s killing all these people? The 2016 data point to three culprits: Alzheimer’s, suicides, and unintentional injuries—a category that includes drug and alcohol–related deaths. Two years ago, 63,632 people died of overdoses. That’s 11,000 more than the previous year, and it’s more than the number of Americans killed during the entire twenty-year Vietnam War. It’s almost twice the number killed in automobile accidents annually, which had been the leading American killer for decades. In 2016, there were 45,000 suicides, a thirty-year high—and the sobering climb shows no signs of abating: the percentage of young people hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and actions has doubled over the past decade.1 We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.