Is Alzheimer's Type 3 Diabetes?
 

High carb diets have been linked to Alzhemier's and low carb diets have been shown to not only help prevent but can be used to treat the disease. I read some articles that say that Alzheimer's is a type of brain diabetes, and now this:

Diabetes Drug Reverses Alzheimer’s Symptoms in Mice; Reduces Brain Plaque Buildup and Improves Memory

http://www.newsweek.com/alzheimers-...elopment-767510

That would be awesome! Unfortunately a lot of things that work in mice don't work in humans. That its a brain diabetes I could believe. 2 older ladies in my bible study died last year from alz and it was very painful to see. There's one more that has it.

My mom has alzheimers, and has eaten a very low fat/high carb diet her entire life, so I can believe it's a form of diabetes, even though she's always had normal blood sugars - "normal blood sugars" being a debatable term, since what's considered normal is pretty high these days.

If that's the case, then it would stand to reason that a diabetes drug could improve memory and help to reverse it. I hope they start conducting some trials on alzheimers sufferers soon to see if it's possible to slow down or reverse the horrible mind degeneration.

Calianna,

There already is information and even research out there that suggests that alzheimers can be slowed or even reversed.

https://www.amazon.com/End-Alzheime...d+of+alzheimers

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_...d=1MLR86XWSKUF7

Jean

Jean's book recommendations are two of the recent ones that discuss AD as a form of diabetes and offer treatments. They are excellent resources.

Unfortunately, like many who contract diabetes, development of AD occurs over a long period of time. It's reasonable to want drug treatment to reverse the damage already done. The important message, however, is to get the word out on AD to mitigate the number of cases in the future. Society still has a hard time understanding the value of a dietary approach and identifying the correct dietary approaches to embrace an effective protocol. So, it's going to be a long road to realize how to achieve AD prevention for the future. The referenced books and other recent research enable people to start taking steps in that direction.

I would like to see some double blind studies on humans who have been cured!
Until then, genetically modified mice just don't get me too excited so I'll just put my money on LC and let the chips fall where they may....

I realize that a LC/HF diet can help prevent alzheimer's - the reason my mother always ate a very low fat high carb diet is that she always despised the taste/texture of "grease" of any kind. She would reduce the amount of oil/butter/margarine/Crisco (She's 90 now -margarine and Crisco were a big part of her era) in recipes, because they were too greasy for her tastes. She would skim every smidgen of grease possible off broth from beef or chicken before using the broth to make gravy. She made at least one cake weekly (usually ate it for breakfast), and even though she'd frost it, she used as little frosting as possible, because of the amount of grease in the frosting. (She'd always make a sheet cake, using only half a can or less of frosting for the cake - sometimes she'd spread the frosting so thin that a can of frosting would cover 3 cakes) Eventually, she developed what she called a breakfast cake, which was just a type of spice cake which had a lot of dried fruits added to it. This was her way of eating long before all the propaganda about fat making you fat - she just always hated any kind of fats in/on her food, and avoided them as much as possible, any way she could.

She also always felt the need for a sugary or starchy "pick me up" at least once or twice during the afternoon, often at least once in the mid-morning too. While she understood at one point that I did not react well to sugars and starches because of my hypoglycemia, she still believed she needed the sugar in her diet, that it wasn't a problem for her, since her blood sugar was considered normal. Even when she was later convinced that she needed to avoid candy and cookies for her sugary pick-me-up, she either ate fruit (apples, bananas, grapes - some of the highest carb fruits), or else sweetened applesauce and graham crackers. She didn't have big snacks, but they were still almost all sugar and starch.

At her age, and with her food preferences (even with her mind going so quickly, she still hates anything she considers to be greasy), I don't think there's really any chance of slowing or reversing her alzheimer's progression through diet. I'm as anti-drug as they come, but if there's a possibility that her condition could be improved some with a drug, then under the circumstances, I think it's worth a try.

Calliana,

My mother died at age 94 of Alzheimers. I tried once, before the obvious onset of alzheimers, to get her to cut out gluten from her diet, not because of alzheimers but because she had intestinal issues that I thought might be helped by dietary changes. She got angry with me for even suggesting it and she hardly ever got angry like that. I surely understand how changing a person's eating habits, especially ones that are so ingrained, are really difficult if not impossible.

I guess I am just skeptical about any pill being developed that will have any kind of powerful effect on the disease, when it is well advanced at least. Seeing my mother's decline was so difficult and sad. I am sorry for what you and your mother are going through. How can you not hope for there to be an answer or at least something that offers some hope?

Jean

From Fox
 

I don't expect anything would completely reverse it for her at this point, since so much of her memory has been lost already, but it would be nice if it didn't get any worse than it already is, and really helpful if there was some way to reverse the current progress of the dementia even a little bit.

I don't know how much gluten she's actually eating these days - I don't get to see her very often, since I live 2-1/2 hours away, and with my erratic work schedule, it might as well be 10 hours away for how seldom I manage to make the trip to see her. DB and DS try to keep me updated on her condition.

I know she's still eating mostly starches though, and might still be eating lots of sugars too - well, relatively speaking, since she often doesn't have much appetite any more, but what few times I've been there when she's eating lately, most of what's on her plate is starchy.

I suppose you've read the articles about T3D. There seem to be many.
https://paleoleap.com/paleo-alzheimers-type-3-diabetes/

My father had diabetic neuropathy before it had a name and the pain was so great he was prescribed opioids. He was T2D. We'll never know if the dementia which killed him just "happened" or was caused by the drugs.

Getting the elderly to embrace change in diet is almost impossible.

Thanks for the article. The author may have been focusing on how the modern diet could be contributing to alzheimer's, but I'm glad he mentioned that there are other factors involved, because that reminded me that there are a lot of drugs (both over the counter and Rx) that seem to be strongly linked to dementia and alzheimers, especially when taken by older patients, and includes antihistamines of all kinds: Mom took antihistamines pretty much 24/7/365 for decades, since the 1960's until just a couple of years ago.

I read that there is a lot of different angles to it. They might have dental problems that leads them to choose soft foods. They often have a loss of smell and taste that means foods need to be "hyper-palatable." Their appetite dwindles under these many challenges, and then they don't want to eat at all.

From my experience with elderly cats, it's probable that their digestion isn't as good as it used to be, either, so they actually need to eat more nutrient-dense, not the junk food they so often fall back on.

And if they ate junk food all their life, there's nowhere to go.

I've just watched a BBC documentary by David Eagleman in which he featured the nun experiment:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/article...ing-nuns-brains

The nuns were regularly cognitively tested and, after death, their brains were dissected. It was shown that many of them had Alzheimer's in the brain but the tests did not detect it - it was put down to them being mentally active. David made the analogy that the brain is like a mechanic's toolbox - if, say, a socket wrench is lost, then there are several other tools that can be used to do the same job e.g. a spanner, adjustable wrench etc.