Handbook for Stopping Alzheimer's

By Eric Rosenblatt

This is a book about stopping the progression to Alzheimer’s. Depending on your APOE genes, which you can find via 23andMe, but also from other groups, there are medications which appear in human studies to stop cognitive decline. I personally have the riskiest genes, two of the APOE4 type, and, at age 67, my decline has already started. If I do nothing, I will probably die in a few years like my father, grandmother, and uncle before me. As doctors can only offer a handful of drugs, intended to manage me and not the disease, I scoured the literature for two years for ways to prolong my life and intellect. By literature, I do not mean casual websites or books by celebrity doctors. I mean journal articles, from well-known and respected journals, that have passed the scrutiny of editors and other published and trustworthy scientists.

To my surprise, I found at least four medicines that show evidence of helping stop Alzheimer’s for people with my gene variation, as shown in human studies carefully evaluated in responsible journals. Two of the four that I now take also apply to people with only a single APOE4 gene. While only about a quarter of the population are carriers of the APOE4 gene, we make up the bulk of Alzheimer’s victims. Finally, at least one of these medicines appears may slow or stop mental decline in everybody, regardless of genes. I also discuss other medications that have shown good results in human experiments, as well as practices that are shown empirically to speed or delay progression to Alzheimer's, such as avoiding sleep apnea.

I am not a medical doctor, nor did I have a hand in the development of any of these medicines. All I can do is try to communicate, for free of course, what I have found. Unlike at least one famous celebrity physician, who provides exactly zero evidence that his protocol can help you, I provide all evidence I have. You can also read the articles I am describing. If all this is too hard for you, perhaps you can have someone you trust read this book or those papers. Also, please keep mind that I have a Ph.D., not an MD. I can not tell you what to do or write you a prescription. I can only tell you what I have read and what I choose to do for myself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eric Rosenblatt
• Release date: Nov 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005200725

Eric Rosenblatt

Hi, As of this moment I am almost 69, In New Orleans, where it is warm and rainy. I retired officially when I was 66 but kind of mailed it in for a year before that. I had been sharp and ambitious, had a PhD in Finance, published 20 papers, got 14 patents granted, married, had three kids, was junior chess champ of Virginia in 1970. Blah, blah, blah. But then I started to decline mentally, slowly since about age forty, but much more quickly from maybe age 60. At age 64, I found out I was APOE4/4, which genetically means Alzheimer's dementia likely and amyloid early, with heart disease and stroke a constant threat. Grandmother, father, uncles, and brother had one or more of all these things and did not live long. So I painstakingly read or browsed a thousand medical papers, which I sort-of still could, and made some bets about a handful of medicines I thought would one day be approved for attenuation of Alzheimer's. I started taking them immediately and explain in this free book why. If you have my problem, you should try to read it, or have someone read it for you. It's short, pretty easy to read, and not quite mind-numbingly boring.

Book preview

STOPPING ALZHEIMER’S

Eric Rosenblatt

Second Edition by Eric Rosenblatt, Ph.D. [e-mail] ,

Copyright © MARCH 2022

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold to other people nor uploaded for further distribution. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

CONTENTS

PREFACE

MY STORY

BREDESEN’S STORY

THE BETA-AMYLOID HYPOTHESIS

HERPES: KEEP IT AT BAY

HOMOTAURINE TO KEEP BETA-AMYLOID FROM CLUMPING

LITHIUM TO CLEAN UP THE BAD BETA-AMYLOID

TACROLIMUS: I TOOK RISKS FOR THIS BUT NO MORE

BUMETANIDE YES, VIAGRA NO: PRECISION MEDICINE

INFLAMMATORY PROCESSES IN THE BRAIN

CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE, ALZHEIMER’S, AND STATINS

TAU

DIET

VITAMINS AND SUPPLEMENTS

EXERCISE AND SLEEP

LIFE STYLE

JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU DO

About the author

References

PREFACE

You are probably in your sixties, or older, losing it like me; maybe you have been labelled MCI (mild cognitive impairment) and maybe not. But you know something is not right. My guess is you would like to know if you can beat Alzheimer’s, or whatever this memory loss and growing stupidity is. Doctors have no answers, and few of them even read the literature for indicators of future results. Well, I will. I have to.

As a PhD, but not a physician, I have done my best over the last three years to read scientific journals, which I will share with you in an honest and hopefully understandable way. I think that we have a shot at not getting worse, or not quickly anyway, using various mainstream medicines (repurposed for Alzheimer’s) that have stopped dementia for significant groups of humans. The medicines are available legally from a doctor, but I get some from an international pharmacy, too.

Originally, meaning a year a half ago, this was called Handbook for Stopping Alzheimer's. I dropped the first couple words, which were kind of meaningless, but that was not my chief goal. I wanted to reflect some new recent developments in the field that moved me to change my regime somewhat. I also wanted to comment on what I think is a pointless approval of a drug called aducanumab (aka Aduhelm). Almost everything I ever spoke well of in the first edition has gone to trial since I started taking it – which means, I guess, that my judgement is pretty mainstream. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Still, trials take forever. You and I are still going to have to guess at what will succeed, since it is unlikely we have the time to wait it out.

Now, the tricky thing about late onset Alzheimer’s is that it is largely a hereditary disease. That does not mean your grandmother gave it to you, but you are in the position you are in now mostly because of certain genes you inherited, in a path that leads through your parents, and which you may have passed on. That’s right, all this is for your kids too. There is one gene in particular to know about, because it does not just dictate your probabilities of Alzheimer’s (and, to a lesser extent, heart attacks) but it also affects what age this happens to you and what you can do about it. This is the APOE gene. I am sorry if you have not heard of it, but it is crucial. Feel free to go look up APOE now on the internet. You do not need to understand it. You just need to know I am not bullshitting you.

There are various places to find APOE, but one is the Health Version of 23andMe, which you can find on line easily enough. You spit into a cup and send it in, with maybe a couple hundred bucks. (I get none of it, do not even know them.) In return, they might write something like: Eric, you have two copies of the ε4 variant we tested which means you have two type 4 APOE genes (APOE4/4). Or they might write you have one copy. But they might also write: you do not have the ε4 variant we tested. If you get the last one, unlikely if you are slipping, but possible, I guess I would not read this book. Sorry for your troubles, but I don’t think I can help.

And let me apologize for giving you homework right off the bat. Personally, I think everyone should have been told their APOE long before they were your age, just like they are told their blood pressure and weight and cholesterol (over and over again).

REFERENCES

MY STORY

Here is my story. You may find some points in common with your own story.

I completed a Ph.D. in Finance late in life, at age 41, because I thought I should be a professor. I published articles in economics after that, got patents on mortgage origination software, but stayed in the business world. Man plans and God laughs. I sent three kids to college, did the office politics, went to lots of meetings, and carved out as scholarly a niche as I could. However, in my late fifties people also started to notice that I had a poor memory. It became a running joke that I regularly forgot about meetings. Oh, it’s just Eric. I was the absent-minded professor, too smart to worry about details. By the time I was sixty, I was having increasing trouble remembering the names of people, passwords, sequences of computer interactions. I had to line maps up with my visual orientation or get confused. This was spookily like previous family members.

My beloved grandmother essentially recognized no one from the age of 75 on and died at age 80. Her oldest, my father, had clearly declining memory in his fifties. He wrote things down in a little notebook that he kept in his shirt pocket because otherwise he forgot. He died at age 73, no longer speaking, recognizing nobody. His younger brother and my affectionate uncle, a professor and psychoanalyst, then got dementia, starting in his early sixties, facing it bravely and with humor, got increasingly addled over about a decade and died in a nursing home. The third and much younger brother, died in his late fifties – but by heart attack. Now they had all smoked cigarettes, and I did not. That was how I explained their early deaths to myself. It could not be in my genes.

Then in late 2015, my five-year-older middle brother, Bernie, started having problems at work. He was 66 at the time. He was a lawyer and told me he was having trouble writing briefs. When he tried a case (something he had previously enjoyed) he found himself frantic and confused. His daughters told me that he was forgetting things that had just been said. A few months after that I went to Bernie’s old office, and he told me for a good ten minutes about how our father had lost some stuff before we moved him to a nursing home, particularly a colorful dictionary we all liked looking at as a kid. He was entertaining and animated. I thought he seemed O.K. Then, Bernie said: Did I tell you about the dictionary? And he started the whole ten-minute spiel again. He simply did not remember that he had just