Can Alzheimer’s be reversed long-term? This case says yes

I wrote the book, it, it's, the book is basically looking at, at, at a case study of mine where I had a patient who'd had Alzheimer's for 15 years already, and, and her neurologist referred th- uh, that couple to me, uh, kind of as a last-ditch effort.

You know, it was like there was nothing else that could be done for this lady.

And, and, and it is a overview of all the things that we did over a two-year period, and how he got his wife back during that time.

It was an amazing, um, uh, regeneration of hippocampal function.

And, and his wife, because of his love and commitment to helping her do all the things that needed to be done, that she in a, of her own recourse could have never done.

So it was because of his willingness to do it that she benefited so much, and there, he benefited by having his wife back, uh, for many, many more years.

That's amazing.

Um, given that so many people wait until they're sick before they actually go, "Oh, I need to take care of myself"-

Yeah [laughs]

... how much, you know, and they, so they come very late to the game with regard to the various, uh, you know, things that you've outlined.

How much can we, um, re- you know, reduce our risk once we're already that far down the, the path?

Yeah, a great question.

And, and again, that's why I wrote the book, because even I, I was concerned when I got that referral.

I said, "Man, this, this is a patient who's not only had Alzheimer's for 15 years", and, um, I actually met her six years before at a diabetes program that I was running, and she, she had diabetes, but she wasn't really doing much about it.

That's, she, she had, she had early Alzheimer's already at that time, but she wasn't implementing the program.

She was stubborn, right? Like many of us are stubborn.

We wanna do what we wanna do, and she didn't really think she could do anything about it.

She, she was not hopeful.

But it was ultimately her husband later on that was, that really believed it could be done, and he did it for her, with her, and she got the results.

So, so if somebody at her level of, uh, uh, you know, she had less than a, a first percentile, uh, one percentile function in her hippocampus.

In other words, the size, the number of neurons in her hippocampi in her brain, the memory neurons, were like l- less than over 99.9% of the population.

So it's, it was just nothing there, very little there, and she was able to dramatically improve her cognition and function over that period of time.

Uh, so if she can do it, all of us can.

So there, but short, short answer to your question is that we can dramatically improve cognition at any time in that continuum.

But you're right, the sooner we pick up on the need for it, the greater will be the impact.

And so it's, it's a lot easier to prevent damage to the brain, uh, than it is to reverse damage to the brain.

Th- that, that just makes sense.

The good news is you can reverse damage to, especially to the hippocampi.

We can actually, you know, the average person is losing 1,000 neurons in their hippocampi every day.

Okay? So we can go from losing 1,000 a day to actually gaining 700 or more a day, and that depends on what we're doing and what we're not doing.

And that's the whole value of the, of the testing part, is that through testing, we learn where our risk factors are, where we can concentrate to both prevent further damage and to begin to reverse the damage that's already there.

Is she now, would you say, asymptomatic of dementia?

Say, say that again?

Is, is, is this patient now asymptomatic of-

No, this, this, this patient actually died of breast cancer-

Oh, okay

... six years later.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Uh, and, uh, there was reasons for that that was not related to what we were doing, obviously.

Uh, but, um, she, she, she made some bad choices at the, at the end that, that depressed her immune system.

And, uh, but basically he, he, I called him up after his wife passed away and talked to him for a while.

He says, "Now," he says, "yeah, the, the, the good news is that I had my wife back for six whole years." In other words, she had been diagnosed with dementia 21 years before.

Wow.

And she had more mind 21 years later than she'd had 30 years before.

Okay? So, so the, the, the, so she did pass away from a recurrent, she, she basically had a recurrence of cancer, like a lot of people are having nowadays, again, because of, uh, some unfortunate choices that were made.