Dr. Mercola April 01 2008 53,670 views
Approximately 10 million American baby boomers will develop Alzheimer‘s disease in their lifetime. This will place enormous strains on the U.S. health-care system.
At least 5.2 million Americans currently suffer from Alzheimer‘s. By 2010, there will be 500,000 new cases each year, and nearly one million new cases annually by 2050.
The disease is now the seventh deadliest illness in the nation.
In last year’s Alzheimer’s Facts and Figures Report, the number of Americans stricken with the disease was 5.1 million. This year’s report brings us up to 5.2 million, including some 200,000 to 250,000 people under the age 65 who are inexplicably stricken with so-called “early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
By 2050, the report estimates that a full 10 million U.S. “baby boomers” will have come down with Alzheimer’s, which translates to 1 out of 8!
The strain this will place on the already faltering U.S. federal Medicare program boggles the mind, as most people with Alzheimer’s are eligible for Medicare. More than three times as much money is spent on people with Alzheimer's and other dementias than the average Medicare recipient.
Currently, Medicare spends over $148 billion per year on Alzheimer’s patient care. A mere two years from now, that number is expected to reach $160 billion annually.
Alzheimer’s is just as much a threat to the future of American adults as the rampant rise in autism is to our children. Clearly something is wrong, but what? Because Alzheimer’s is not a normal part of aging, any more than autism is a “stage” that children commonly go through.
What is Alzheimer’s?
Alzheimer’s disease is a chronic form of dementia that results in severe memory loss and eventually death. The average lifespan of someone with Alzheimer’s is about eight years, although many can survive up to 20 years with proper care.
It’s not entirely clear what causes Alzheimer's disease, but it (as well as autism) are related to thyroid hormone dysfunction, intracellular T3 (immune system cells) deficiency, and diabetes.
One type of Alzheimer’s, called frontotemporal dementia, is characterized by cellular damage in the front and side regions of your brain. Researchers still have no idea what causes it—only that excess production of a tiny protein fragment called beta-amyloid starts jamming the signals between your brain synapses, blocking information flow, leading to a cascade of damaging events that end in cell death.
Risk Factors for Alzheimer’s Disease
The risk factors for AD include genetic, environmental and dietary factors. Certain diseases also heighten your risk. People with diabetes, for example, have up to 65 percent higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
The primary genetic risk factor is the presence of the Apo lipoprotein E epsilon4 (APOE e4) allele, which is more common among Africans, Inuits, Amerindians, Northern Europeans than southern Europeans.
Primary dietary risk factors include trans-fatty acids that are found in so many processed foods (labeled as partially-hydrogenated vegetable oils). One prospective study also found that elevated homocysteine levels were associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer’s. Homocysteine levels are elevated when you are deficient in vitamin B6, folate, and vitamin B12.
Primary environmental factors include: smoking, obesity, and exposure to fluoride, aluminum and mercury.
How to Prevent Alzheimer’s
Fortunately, there are ways to reduce your chances of getting Alzheimer’s. These simple lifestyle changes can help keep your brain in optimal working order well past your 60’s.
...when the ability to make estrogen is impaired, as in old age, exposure to BPA could adversely affect hippocampal function and contribute to age-related neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, in which hippocampal function is impaired.
The cause of all this disease is so complex, cumulative, and individual based on each person's different toxic load and ability to metabolize all these nasty chemicals we take in, scientists will keep scratching their heads. They will never get the cookie-cutter answer they're looking for. And of course, drug companies will keep raking in the dough
Hi bmc, I agree with you. As a matter of fact I tend to listen to everything you say. Keep up the good thinking.
Absolutely, aluminum and barium have been detected in the fallout from these sprayings. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and you sure don't need governments to admit they're spraying something from airplanes causing those weird "clouds" and "contrails" that hang in the sky for hours & hours that have to be coming down on top of us or tell us why they're doing it -- not that they'd ever tell us the truth about it -- nor do we need to question whether or not the government cares they're poisoning us because it's going to be a cold day in Hell before they care whether we live or die and truth be known it might be being done to eliminate people in certain areas; more likely though it's an experiment and we're, as usual, the guinea pigs. Collateral damage -- like spraying our soldiers in Vietnam with 100 X concentrated Agent Orange; like that could be healthy for them?
"Conspiracy theory" us all you want, KiwiMatt, but the facts do speak for themselves and what viable explanation do you offer that contradicts what I'm saying?
Notice how posts keep going missing?
kellymars281951 my last comment was a bit criptic, I didn't realise but there are kind of 2 message boards running, and they don't synchronize the pair. If you check out the "Health Blog" part there is more up to date comments. I wasted heaps of time figuring this out.
The Agent Orange is safe, it was the dioxin contaminant from the Taanaki chemical plant that has caused health problems. It is not and "it's not the gun that kills people, it's the bullet" arguement. The reason it is called a contanimant is because it wasn't supposed to be in there in the first place.
I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person. But they need to be able to withstand cursory investigation and logic based questions (as opposed to emotive rhetorical ones "like could that be healthy for them?")
If you want to get an idea what proper reasoning is like go to http://www.philosopher.org/ and www.p4c.org.nz/values.html
Dr Christine I believe antacid for indigestion contains aluminium? I have never taken it myself but do you know if people who take it suffer from early onset alzheimer's disease ?
Working with families and residents with Alzheimers for the past seven years on a daily basis I have found the Disease does not spare Librarians, Physicians or any other trade.We also have a huge number of Vascular Dementia which comes from small tia's [ strokes in the brain ] and many end up with Alzheimers as well it's a terrible combination. We have many many Diabetics that have Alzheimers most receive insuline injections.There are many types of Dementia such as Parkinsons Dementia, Drug and Alcohol related at least 1000 according to Mayo Clinic but Alzheimers is the fastest growing. All Residents are required to have flu shots as well as employees in Healthcare, nothing like adding insult to injury.
Programs like ours address all levels of the Disease.I have seen these folks do best when they get into a good program early, the structure helps the frustration and because we work from long term memory they are able to do activities they know and can engage in.The social activites are extremely beneficial.
Families have no idea that their loved ones nutritional habits are in any way related.The Residents refrigerators are often full of various soda's and junk food.We monitor this otherwise they would not eat a regular healthy diet. It's a very sad Disease and what they did not know has hurt them.These folks cannot live alone even though I have been made aware that we have people driving our highways with Alzheimers.You know how they do that ? from their long term memory, frightening huh! As long as they stay in their home that they are familiar with [ 30 years say ] and go down the same road to the store they can function for a long time. Safety is a whole other issue.I think we are going to find that the numbers are going to be much higher.Go to Alzheimers website they have a lot of info. and need our help.
You're right about driving on long term memory, even long distances: my mother stuck to outdated routes, ignoring changes in traffic and new roads, for many years. When I broke my leg and needed her to drive me home a long way, she took around 5 hours to do a journey that should have taken around 90 minutes, becoming extremely upset when I tried, carefully, to make suggestions (when I noticed we were going completely the wrong direction).
As she got worse, she would look in her mirror then reverse straight into things she hadn't noticed were there. She finally lost her licence when she went out to post a letter and totalled her own car and four parked cars. Luckily no one else was hurt and she had only a bruised wrist.
Her long term memory now gives us something to talk about when I visit her in the nursing home; as a child, she memorised a poem giving all the kings and queens of England - she can sometimes still recite it, even though she can't remember how many children she's got, or our names. Her diagnosis is Lewy bodies dementia, by the way.
PS Why are calling yourself England? Just wondering.
In her book, Electromagnetic Fields, written in 1995, B. Blake Levitt has this to say: "Many people think that Alzheimer's disease - a progressive, fatal, complete mental deterioration - is a a disorder of normal aging that afflicts an unlucky few. But there is nothing about Alzheimer's that is normal to aging. Nor is it related to mild forgetfulness. It is a degeneration of the neurons in specific areas of the brain that results from some disturbance within nerve-cell networks utilizing the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.
Just ten years ago, Alzheimer's was considered an obscure and rare condition, but today it is the nation's fourth leading cause of death. What happened? Is it simply that better diagnosis has turned up more statistically reliable numbers, which perhaps had been lumped together in years past with senile dementia? Or ware we dealing with another degenerative nerve disease increasing in incidence beyond a mere increase in the population? It looks like the latter is true - although increases increases in the population of those living beyond the age of eighty-five plays a significant role in the sheer numbers of cases today. And although there are only a handful of indicative studies and much speculation at this stage, there is a possibility that some EMF frequencies may play an important role, too.
Alzheimer's is a specific organic disease that afflicts only some people. It is quite different from memory lapses that plague all of us as we age, in which long-term memory is crystal clear and short-term memory seems to all but evaporate. A typical memory lapse of old age would be a person's remembering in vivid detail an event from youth as if it were yesterday but forgetting where his or her glasses were a minute ago. With Alzheimer's, people forget that they ever wore glasses.
Alzheimer's is a physical process in which the nerve cells of the brain take on the abnormal characteristics of "plaques" and "tangles." In time brain tissue comes to...
...resemble long strands of gray knotted rubber. The disease affects women twice as often as men. Women who have taken anti-inflammatory drugs for arthritis or have had estrogen-replacement therapy have been found in some studies to have a reduced risk of developing the disorder. These studies indicate that inflammation as well as hormonal changes may be important factors. (EMFs annd hormonal changes were discussed in Chapters 7 and 8.)
Research particular to acetylcholine was conducted in 1976 by a research group headed by J.J. Noval, at the Naval Air Development Center in Johnsville, Pennsylvania. Studies using rats exposed to very weak electric fields vibrated in th extremely low frequency ranges (the kind of EMF typical of any office or modern home) produces an increase in brain-stem acetycholine levels, indicating a subliminal stress response in test animals. (This also has implications for humans and low-level 'contact currents' produced by touching any common machine, including small appliances. Far more work needs to explore this possibility.)
Genetics may also be involved. Several studies have found a genetic abnormality similar to those with Down's syndrome also occurring in Alzheimer's patients. And recent research has found that the presence of a protein molecule called apoliprotein E (ApoE4) was present in 64 percent of those studied with Alzheimer's, whereas only 31 percent of those in the control group had E4. (However the presence or absence of E4 was found to have a clearer relationship to the age of the person at the onset of Alzheimer's. Some of those without E4 did get the disease, but the onset was after age eight-four.)
Recent research by Daniel Alkon, at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, has turned up a fundamental difference between the skin cells of Alzheimer's patients and healthy people. Alzheimer's patients appear to have defective potassium ion channels, which funnel potassium out of the cells. It was...
[part 3] ...found that Alzheimer's patients had this cellular malfunction in the nerve cells leading from the nose to the brain. Learning and memory are associated with a number of changes in the flow of potassium ions through cellular channels. It is not known yet whether the defect originates within the brain, or even whether it precedes Alzheimer's symptoms. All that remains to be seen.
Some important questions need to be asked, such as: Are different EMF frequencies responsible for opening and closing (or permanently shutting down) potassium channels in the same way that research indicates window effects for calcium ion channels at the cellular level? Could an EMF resonance factor be involved with potassium ions? Melatonin is also known to be suppressed in those with Alzheimer's, and EMFs have been found to lower melatonin in some studies. is there any significance to the concentration of magnetite in the nasal area? What of the studies that have found EMFs to increase the permeability of the blood-brain barrier?
Recent work done jointly by Dr. Eugene Sobel, of the University of Southern California School of Medicine, and Dr. Joseph Bowman, of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, found statistically significant increases in Alzheimer's in some EMF-related occupations. The researchers combined the data from one American study and two Finnish studies and found that tailors, seamstresses, and dressmakers (who work with electric sewing machines) were overrepresented among the Alzheimer's cases. Increases were also seen for carpenters and electrical engineers, among other EMF professions. A fourth study is in the offing, as well as additional research in Finland.
Dr. Sobel indicated that the use of certain high-EMF-emitting machines may eventually be linked with Alzheimer's, but that a casual relationship between EMFs and specific people is premature. Kitchens, however, are high-EMF sources, and this may eventually account for the...
[part 4] ...two-to-one ratio between women and men with Alzheimer's.
There is also some indication that the microwave frequencies are particularly suspect. Dr. Sam Koslov, director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins University, found, in a study using microwave exposures on chimpanzees, that the repeated low-level nonthermal exposures to the eyes produced clinical Alzheimer's in test animals. At autopsy, the classic plaques and tangles were found in brain tissue. (The researchers discovered this relationship by accident; they were testing for something else.)
Regarding the causes of Alzheimer's, a range of possibilities exists, including subtle genetic alterations initiated by environmental EMFs. Or EMFs may be acting as co-factors in melatonin suppression and in changes to the blood-brain barrier, potassium ion channels, or acetylcholine levels in the brain stem, among other possibilities. With between 2 and 4 million people afflicted with Alzheimer's in the United States alone, this will prove to be one of the most provocative research areas within the next few decades.
pp. 200-203