Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Disease Treatments
Why So Many Alzheimer’s Treatment Trials Have Failed, But You Don’t Have to Wait for a Miracle Cure
A March 13, 2018, article published online by Inside Science aptly suggests that the failure of Alzheimer’s disease treatment trials – approximately 250 trials in all with a market cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars – is perhaps because researchers don’t understand the disease. The problem is that treatment trials are designed to address Alzheimer’s disease as if it has a single cause. It is now clear that this line of thinking is wrong.
Thanks to modern imaging, breakthroughs in genetics, microbiology, our understanding of the brain’s immune system, and cell biology we now know that Alzheimer’s disease has many causes and those causes can be different for each person who gets the disease. Michael Murphy, associate professor at the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, is quoted as saying, there are likely “a whole cascade of events that lead to Alzheimer’s. The process is far more complicated.”
Enter the work of Dr. Dale Bredesen, an internationally recognized expert in the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease, founding president and CEO for the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and Chief Scientist for Brain Health at AHNP Precision Health. In two seminal journal publications later summarized and expanded upon in his book, The End of Alzheimer’s, Dr. Bredesen demonstrates a multimodal approach that effectively prevents and reverses cognitive decline. This is the first program to utilize the idea that many causes contribute to the disease and a program that addresses those many causes – what Dr. Bredesen calls the “36 holes in the roof” – can change the trajectory of an illness currently affecting an estimated 5.7 million Americans and nearly 50 million people worldwide.
This breakthrough, known at The Bredesen Protocol, does not involve medication. Instead, by using laboratory-based evaluation to identify the precise areas of imbalance, targeted supplementation, natural hormone restoration, nutrition, and lifestyle medicine, those affected by memory decline are now able to restore function, in some cases reversing the effects of Alzheimer’s completely.
Dr. Ken Sharlin is one of the few neurologists in the world who have had the privilege of studying under Dr. Bredesen and he brings this approach to his neurology-based functional medicine clinic in Ozark, MO. “We take the Bredesen Protocol,” says Dr. Sharlin, “and lay it out in a way that folks can understand. It’s not easy. It takes work. There are a lot of lab tests and it is a large amount of information to put into action.” That’s what they do at Sharlin Health and Neurology. Dr. Sharlin and his team at the Springfield neurology clinic have helped hundreds of patients restore their brain health, and report that 90% of those who participate in his program have improvement on memory testing. Our Alzheimer’s treatment results in Springfireld are incomparible to normal treatments. With those odds who would want to wait for a cure when breakthrough treatment is available immediately?