Alzheimer's & ApoE4
This is controversial, but most of the significant human shifts start out controversial.
I'm currently 31, and I am actively focused on preventing Alzheimer's and reversing my own cognitive decline. Most people will say it's unnecessary until later on or it is flat out impossible, but I refuse to believe that.
Here's the hard truth: Genetically, I have a significantly increased risk of getting Alzheimer's. About a one-in-three chance.
Why? I have an ApoE4 allele. This means my risk of getting Alzheimer's goes from about 9% to a whopping 30%. 😱If I had two ApoE4 alleles, my risk would be over 50%.
I was shocked when I learned this. Shocked not even by my own stats -- shocked that almost everyone has AT LEAST a 9% chance of Alzheimer's.
And 25% of people have the same gene variant as me -- so 1 out of every 4 people has a 30% chance of developing Alzheimer's.
And Conventional Western medicine tells us that there is nothing we can do about it. It is something that just happens to us and we have to live with that diagnosis.
What a horrific waiting game.
Are we all really just going to accept that one out of every 10 people we know will literally lose their mind?!
This seems bonkers to me. Just because we don't have a universally acknowledged "cure" doesn't mean there's nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
As one of my most impressive physician friends (and Rupa Health advisor) says, "genes may pull the gun out, but your environment pulls the trigger." Meaning, our genes aren't our destiny -- we can do things to help regulate their expression. And the expression is what matters - that's what determines if you actually get Alzheimer's or not.
Here's the exciting part. There are known things we can do to protect our brain and significantly decrease our changes of actually getting the disease.
While our conventional medicine system has not been able to prevent or reverse Alzheimer's in people, functional (root cause) medicine has...for hundreds of people over the last few years.
Yes, I was shocked too! There are people who have prevented and entirely REVERSED their Alzheimer's disease.
Ok, then why aren't we hearing about this and singing it from the rooftops? (I know, my thoughts exactly.)
One of the reasons is because it's controversial within our current Western medicine system. The treatment is not a pill, it's a protocol. Alzheimer's is a complicated disease, and while Western medicine has been in search of the magic single drug, functional medicine MD Dale Bredesen builds comprehensive, personalized protocols for his patients. The protocols include dietary changes, supplements, exercise, and more. And he's getting real results! Western medicine has been looking for a single drug to just get rid of the actual disease after it's already there, while this protocol focuses on eliminating the disease as well as the root causes of the disease. Bredesen has actually broken down Alzheimer's into 3 subcategories and treats each subcategory differently. Needless to say, this personalization, use of diet, lifestyle, & supplements, and multi-variate solutions are NOT your normal measured single drug solution. It's difficult, if not impossible, to conduct RCTs on multi-variate protocols like this one (esp. when so much personalization is occurring), so it's not considered "gold standard" by some.
But it's working. And how can someone not be ecstatic about that?!
If there are things that I can do to potentially prevent or reverse cognitive decline -- and the things aren't otherwise harmful to my health (they're actually overall REALLY GOOD for me), why wouldn't I do them? Yes, there are many challenges with this approach — it is WAY more difficult to edit our lifestyle than take a pill — but if there’s something (anything!) out there that works, isn’t that revolutionary?
So that's exactly what I'm doing.
Main things I'm doing to prevent and reverse my own cognitive decline:
Getting regular lab testing done - Vit D, thyroid markers, inflammatory markers, core nutrients, metals, and more
Optimizing my nutritional intake - supplementing with Zinc, Mag, Glutathione, etc.
Sleep is not a "nice to have" anymore
Eliminating sugar (mostly)
Oh and by the way - my physician friend mentioned above --> she was able to reverse her mother's early onset Alzheimer's by following Bredesen's protocol. Her mom is healthier than ever in her 70s and traveling the world solo. 🙌
This is the stuff that gets me fired up! 🤩
Love,
Tara
P.S. Quick explanation of gene versus allele:
Let's say - instead of passing down "genes" our parents passed down "apples". Each parent has two apples from each of their parents, but they can each only pass down one apple to you. There are many types of apples out there in the world that your parents could have - Fuji, Red Delicious, Gala, Honeycrisp, etc. These different types of apples are alleles. Your parents can only pass down the types of apples (the alleles) they have. Let's say your mom passes down a Red Delicious and your dad passes down a Gala.
Now in your apple GENE, you have the gala ALLELE and the Red Delicious ALLELE.
ApoE = Gene
ApoE4 = Allele (specific type of gene)
On my ApoE gene --> I have one ApoE3 allele and one ApoE4 allele.
There are 3 possible alleles for the ApoE gene:
- ApoE2 (least common)
- ApoE3 (most common)
- ApoE4 (somewhere in between)