Why Some People With Alzheimer’s Do Improve

Alzheimer’s is supposed to be an incurable disease. And yet some, but not all, patients with Alzheimer’s get better with treatment. Why is that?

Why do some get better, and some don’t?

An amazing new study offers a good answer to that confusing question. And the answer might be surprising to more than a few who believe that treating Alzheimer’s is just a waste of time.

Scientists recently wondered if the reason was because there were so many different causes of senility. And maybe some patients have several senility causes all at the same time. That would explain the different results.

So they looked at a group of more than 1,100 men and women who had been getting regular cognitive testing during the last years of their lives. Some of them died with a specific diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, some with a diagnosis of another form of dementia, and some died without any cognitive impairment at all. The researchers then correlated the patients’ cognitive scores with the microscopic examination of their brains. They were specifically looking for evidence of these five different brain abnormalities that cause dementia: Alzheimer’s, Lewy body dementia, hippocampal sclerosis, microinfarcts (mini-strokes), and low brain weight.

The first thing they found was expected. The greater the level of cognitive impairment that the patients had, the greater the brain abnormalities. But that’s not all. They also found that the patients with the most severe cases of dementia had more than one different brain abnormality. And when they looked at the brains of people who never developed dementia, they found that it was rare for them to have more than one abnormality.

The researchers concluded that the total number of different causes of dementia was a lot more likely to predict who had severe cases than any one brain abnormality. And here’s the critical point. Most of the cases of severe dementia that had been labeled as Alzheimer’s were in fact combinations of different brain ailments rather than from Alzheimer’s alone.

The researchers found signs of Alzheimer’s in about half of the brains. But it was the main cause in only 50% of those cases. And that’s not all. They also discovered that most men and women with significant cognitive impairment during their final years had few or no Alzheimer’s-type abnormalities. Now why am I so excited about this report?

It’s because there just isn’t anything out there that can be done right now to stop or reverse a pure case of Alzheimer’s. However, according to the study, the worst cases of supposed Alzheimer’s are combinations of other different conditions. And some treatments can be effective in preventing and reversing some of these other conditions.

So it’s very possible, indeed better than a 50/50 chance that a patient with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s dementia will become better with the right treatment. Here’s a list of what can work: di-sodium EDTA chelation therapy, controlling blood sugar, regular exercise, controlling blood pressure, nutritional supplements, ozone therapy, and hormonal replacement therapy.

So if you have a loved one who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or any other kind of dementia, don’t give up. This study shows that the diagnosis may be incomplete, and there may be something that can be done.