“Every 66 seconds, someone in the United States develops Alzheimer’s disease. Currently, more than 5 million Americans live with the memory-robbing ailment and by 2050 that number could rise as high as 16 million, according to new figures from the Alzheimer’s Association.
“Scientists are working to find ways to not only treat
Alzheimer’s but prevent it from developing in the first place. In one key step
in the process, researchers are gaining a better understanding of the role of
amyloid proteins in the development of the disease.
“‘The amyloid plaques build up outside of the nerve cells
[in the brain] and now we know that when the nerve cells interact with the
plaque, it causes the nerve cell to make a tangle inside,’ explains Rudy Tanzi,
Ph.D., director of the Alzheimer’s Genome Project and a leading researcher in
the field at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. ‘And
that tangle then chokes the nerve cell from within and kills it. So the killing
process begins with the amyloid – that’s kind of the gun – but the tangle’s the
bullet, so to speak.’
“Experts now believe these amyloid plaques and the tangles
they form start occurring in people’s brains 10 to 15 years before any symptoms
like memory loss begin to show.
“The latest drug development efforts are focused on intervening much
earlier on, before the disease takes an irreversible toll on memory and
cognitive function. Tanzi likened it to taking statins to manage cholesterol to
prevent a future heart attack.
“Another increasingly important focus of medical research is
neuro-inflammation in the brain — why it happens, and how to stop it. For
patients with Alzheimer’s, Tanzi explained, ‘What’s killing most of your nerve
cells is neuro-inflammation, where the brain has reacted against all these
plaques and tangles and cell death with an inflammatory response. And only over
the last 5 years, we’ve discovered the genes that control neuro-inflammation in
Alzheimer’s and we’re doing drug discovery based on those as well.’
“Yet, while such drugs
can take years to develop, Tanzi says there are things people can do right
now to help protect their brain. He spoke with CBS News chief medical
correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook about these strategies:
Q: Aside from choosing the right parents, what can somebody
do to prevent Alzheimer’s – or try to help prevent Alzheimer’s?
A: The four big categories are diet, exercise, sleep and
stress reduction. I wrote about this in detail in my last book, ‘Super Genes’ – six chapters, more than you wanted
to know about how to adapt your diet to minimize inflammation and
plaques. Meaning Mediterranean diet, probiotics – take care of your gut bacteria.
Q: Which probiotics?
A: Yogurt, a yogurt drink like kefir, or a probiotic pill
with live bacteria.
Q: But there’s so many different ones ... which ones? Do we
know yet? We don’t know yet.
A: It’s a hot area right now. There are companies that are
looking at what are the best bacteria to put in a probiotic.
Q: Why would what’s going on in your gut affect what’s going
on in your brain?
A: So it turns out there’s what’s called a gut-brain axis,
where the bacteria in your gut are creating chemicals that interact
with your brain that do everything from determine your mood to control how much
inflammation there is in your brain.
Q: And even obesity, right? It’s amazing what we’re learning about
these trillions of bacteria that people were saying, ‘Oh, wash them out … I’m
going to get cleansed. They’re icky! Let’s get them out of us!’ It turns out,
of course, millions of years of evolution – they’re there for a reason.
A: And you want to take care of them. They’re there to help
you. A Mediterranean diet, more fiber, more fruit, what are called
prebiotics, probiotics – meaning, if you don’t know exactly what probiotic pill
to take, at least live-culture yogurt. I drink kefir every morning. And then
after diet – exercise. You know at least an hour-long brisk walk, or try
to get 8,000 to 10,000 steps if you’re using a device. And sleep. Eight hours. After 40 years old, you have to get
seven to eight hours of sleep, and try your best to do it because as you cycle
in and out of REM sleep, this is when you clean amyloid plaque out of your
brain.
Q: That was one of the most amazing discoveries, when I
first read about that – you’re actually ‘garbage collecting’ at night when
you’re asleep. The toxins get carried out of your brain.
A: The brain – first of all, the cells that can cause
inflammation, when they’re behaving are clearing the plaque. So you want to
keep these certain cells clearing the plaque away and not causing inflammation.
During the deep sleep, those cells eat all the plaque. And then the brain
literally, physically constricts itself and releases the plaque debris – the
proteins from the plaque – into the spinal fluid and out of the brain to wash
away.
You can actually see the brain physically constricting after
the material’s been broken down by the resident cells. And this only happens
during delta – slow-wave – the deepest sleep that comes in after REM. So you
want to be able to cycle in and out of REM several times per night. Kind of
like a dishwasher on multiple cycles, you want to go in and out to clean the
brain as much as you can every night with sleep.
Q: So it’s coming down to what our parents told us, right?
Eat your fruits and vegetables, get a lot of exercise, get plenty of sleep. And
then the last thing you said was stress reduction.
A: Managing stress. It turns out, we just published a study
on meditation, a new trial on how does meditation affect your
gene activity – your gene expression, as we call it. We did it with folks
at Mount Sinai [Hospital] in New York. And what we found was that with a meditation practice, there are changes in your gene
expression that work against inflammation and that actually create a healthier
state. We also see changes in genes that affect the amount of amyloid in your
brain during a full one-week intensive meditation course.
So we have meditation instructors, we have novice meditators
who are learning, and our control group of people at the same resort who were
just hanging out and having fun but not learning how to meditate. And there
were significant differences in terms of very beneficial gene expression
changes in those who were meditating.
Q: One of the biggest fears my patients have is that they
might be developing dementia. So how do you distinguish between a ‘senior
moment’ and dementia? I mean, people would kind of flippantly say, if you can’t
find your car keys that’s one thing, if you find them and don’t know what they
do, that’s another thing. But I always found that a very flip answer. What do
you really say to a patient in that situation?
A: Well the fact is, as we get older, we don’t recall names
as well, we can see the face of an actor we know but can’t recall the name as
fast. There are changes that happen in the brain just as there are changes in
the muscles. Our joints, our muscles get a bit weaker. So that’s why it’s so
important to work out physically and mentally. You know, stay engaged in learning new things.
Q: Crossword puzzles? Learning a new language?
A: I like to say – if crossword puzzles help you, if it’s
the New York Times it would help you between Friday and Sunday, because you’d
probably have to look something up and learn something new. But it’s really learning new things. When you learn something new, you make
new synapses – connections between nerve cells [in the brain]. And all learning
is based on what you already knew, you learn by association to what you already
knew. So not only do you make new synapses, but you strengthen the ones you
already have.”
www.pcrm.org/health/diets/alzheimers/alzheimers-disease-resources
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