Alzheimer's cures are big business for the medical industry, but prevention is more effective, writes Patrick Holford, founder of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION).

Everybody wants a cure for Alzheimer’s. The medical industry has spent around $100 billion searching for one and, so far, come up relatively empty-handed with over 30 failed drug trials.

The focus has been on drugs that lower two of the chemical compounds associated with Alzheimer’s and dementia in general – amyloid and p-tau, a pair of messed up proteins that can lead to plaques in the brain and tangled nerves.

There is a third compound: an amino acid called homocysteine, that becomes toxic if you have too much, that the drug industry and the Alzheimer charities don’t talk about, for reasons that will become clear.

The actual clinical measures that are used to diagnose Alzheimer’s are a decline in cognitive function and shrinkage of the central area of the brain called the medial temporal lobe.  Both changes in cognitive function and brain shrinkage can be picked up 30 years before a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is made.

So now a £10 million study is underway to see if a blood test for p-tau, or amyloid, will ‘predict’ if you are more likely to develop the disease and there are plans for a major programme to identify those at risk so they can be treated as early as possible.

This sounds sensible but there are serious drawbacks. To begin with not everyone with raised p-tau or amyloid go on to develop Alzheimer’s.

This means, as a recent article in the New York Times titled ‘Apparently healthy but diagnosed with Alzheimer’s’ pointed out, people without a diagnosis or a brain scan showing shrinkage could well be offered new drug treatments that are, so far, only marginally better than placebos but have awful adverse effects

These include brain bleeding or swelling which has occurred in more than one on four in the last two drug trials and resulted in seven deaths. Medical agencies in the US, EU and UK are reluctant to license their use but are under a lot of pressure to do so. 

So, thousands of desperate people with early-stage Alzheimer’s or cognitive decline, hoping for a cure, are queuing up to join these drug trials because they perceive these drugs, that so far come with little or no benefit plus highly unpalatable side effects, are a better alternative than doing nothing.

Alternatives to Alzheimer's drugs

But are there really no alternatives? Well, none that patients are routinely told about. They involve changes in diet and lifestyle, that are very likely to improve your overall health, including that of your brain, and very unlikely to cause damaging side effects. 

Almost all money for research, pledged by governments and raised by Alzheimer’s charities, is going in the direction of drug treatments. Alzheimer’s Research UK’s (ARUK) website says, “we exist for a cure”.

Most of the money is going toward amyloid and p-tau related research, neither of which have been established as causal. In other words, high levels may just be a consequence of the disease process.

The same is not true for raised blood levels of homocysteine. If levels rise in the brain, it shrinks faster and cognitive abilities decline. If it goes down, they improve, and brain shrinkage slows.

This means that it is causing the damage and so would logically be a target for treatment. The only way to do it, however, is with high dose B vitamins (B6, B12 and folate).

Several gold standard, placebo-controlled trials have found this to be very safe and effective. But this approach is not patentable and so yields nothing like a drug profit.

But the benefits of treating homocysteine don’t stop there. It is a much better biomarker of risk for Alzheimer’s than plaque and p-tau both because it is more easily measured and more safely lowered.

And when it is lowered, unlike those two, it actually improves cognitive function and slows brain shrinkage by as much as two thirds. It also helps to stop p-tau formation.

Routinely checking homocysteine levels could prevent thousands of cases. Just doing this “could save costs to the UK economy of approximately £60 million per year,” says Dr Apostolos Tsiachristas, Associate Professor in Health Economics at the University of Oxford. His research also estimated it would promote healthy longevity, adding 14 years to life expectancy. 

About half of people over 65 have a homocysteine level above 11mcmol/l, which is where it starts to become damaging. 

In one study, a third of those treated ended the study with no clinical dementia rating, meaning they could no longer be diagnosed with cognitive impairment. Those with sufficient omega-3 DHA, which is the most important structural fat in the brain, had 73% less brain shrinkage compared to placebo when given the B vitamin treatment.

"Is plaque the cause of tooth decay?"

In contrast, in the last anti-amyloid treatment trial, brain shrinkage accelerated by about a fifth in those getting the drug, compared to placebo and not one person achieved a clinical dementia rating of zero.

It should be clear by now, after decades of scientific research that amyloid plaque is not a cause of Alzheimer’s, but a consequence. The same is likely to be true for p-tau tangles.

As an analogy, consider your teeth. Is plaque the cause of tooth decay?  Sure, flossing your teeth and getting the plaque scraped off by the dental hygienist helps, but what causes the plaque?

The answer is a bad diet – in this case, one high in sugar and low in fibre. Despite 50 years of research there is no ‘cure’ for tooth decay, but it can be prevented.

The same concept applies to Alzheimer’s, which is as preventable as tooth decay with the right diet and nutrition and lifestyle – which also happens to include less sugar and more fibre.

Alzheimer's prevention

How preventable is Alzheimer’s? It accounts for two thirds of dementia cases. The most conservative figure is 40%. More optimistic estimates say around 80%.

Since only one in a hundred cases is caused by genes, Alzheimer’s may be entirely preventable in those 99% who do not have the rare causative genes and act early enough to optimise all diet and lifestyle factors.

It is not an inevitable consequence of the ageing process, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of people don’t get it.

Why the difference in figures? It’s all to do with what is or isn’t included in prevention studies. The most widely used review for dementia prevention in the UK is the 2020 report of the Lancet Commission, authored by Professor Gill Livingston.

Both this and the first edition in 2017 failed to even mention homocysteine, despite being repeatedly sent all the evidence of the undeniable beneficial effects of homocysteine-lowering B vitamins by the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing (OPTIMA) at the University, headed by former Deputy Head of Medical Science, Professor David Smith.

This is a major and damaging error and has led to the widespread belief that B vitamin supplements are not part of the usual list of preventive actions.

But it should be corrected, especially considering that a US National Institutes of Health study attributes 22% of the risk of Alzheimer’s to raised homocysteine.

Also, the best study of all, looking at 396 studies in total, published in 2020, concluded: "Homocysteine-lowering treatment seems the most promising intervention for Alzheimer’s disease prevention."

Other prevention studies you may have read are possibly based on data from the UK Biobank. This major research data bank also ignores homocysteine, not for any malevolent reason but simply because it wasn’t measured when it was enrolling people.

So, one of the single biggest risk factors and arguably the simplest to change, is repeatedly ignored.

Research money on preventing Alzheimer's

Given that a conservative half of Alzheimer’s cases could be prevented, shouldn’t half the available research money be spent on prevention? This certainly doesn’t happen at the moment.

Of the three leading charities, two spend nothing on prevention. ARUK claim to spend 5% but none of this goes towards B vitamins or other brain-friendly nutrients such as omega-3 or vitamin D.

They too ignore homocysteine, and the beneficial effects of lowering it with B vitamins, as first shown in a 2010 Oxford University study they actually helped fund.

Prevention studies are almost always going to underestimate (never overestimate) the power of prevention due to excluding risk factors, but also because they largely ignore the ‘1+1=3’ compounding impact of interactive risk factors. B vitamins, for example, don’t work without sufficient omega-3, and omega-3 fish oils don’t work in people with raised homocysteine, because of a lack of B vitamins.

This has been shown in four trials – in the UK, Holland, Sweden and China. The combination of B vitamins given to people sufficient in omega-3 DHA improved the reduction in brain shrinkage from 53% to 73%.

Pollution exposure is a risk factor but, in those with lower homocysteine this effect is much reduced. Poor sleep is a risk factor, but less so in those who exercise. 

For the past five years, leading UK researchers led by neurologist Professor Peter Garrard, who is the director of the dementia research group in the St George’s, University of London Neuroscience Research Section, have tried to get funding to test the most promising combination – B vitamins and omega-3 – to no avail. Such a trial is badly needed and would cost of a fraction of that being spent on amyloid or p-tau.

Assessing risk factors with 'citizen science'

So, what if a person does everything right – enough B vitamins to keep homocysteine low, sufficient omega-3, low sugar, high fibre diet, enough vitamin D (Alzheimer’s is four times less likely in those with sufficient vitamin D), and an active physical, intellectual and social lifestyle, plus good sleep and not too much stress? 

The only ongoing study and database, the COGNITION Biobank, that assesses all these risk factors as well as including blood tests of four critical biomarkers, homocysteine, omega-3 index, vitamin D and HBA1c, which measures glucose control, is being run by the charity foodforthebrain.org.

It describes itself as ‘citizen science’ because anyone can get involved doing a free online Cognitive Function Test, filling in a questionnaire about their diet, lifestyle and medical history, and sending in a blood sample from a home test kit. 

So far, over 400,000 people have been tested. But, unlike the £10 million trial, funded by the People’s Lottery, the Gates Foundation, ARUK and the Alzheimer’s Society, it gets no funding. It is literally funded by the citizen scientists who chip in £50 a year and pay for their own tests. Their message is simple: prevention is better than cure.

To test yourself, visit foodforthebrain.org. To find out more about prevention, visit alzheimersprevention.info.

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