Dr. Dale Bredesen Interviewed

Today, I watched a YouTube interview with Dr. Dale Bredesen, author of The End of Alzheimer's, conducted by Dr. Joseph Mercola.  Mercola is an alternative medicine vlogger, and the interview was posted on July 28.  Both men are controversial, but I got answers to a couple of questions I had.

I discuss Dr. Bredesen's work in Beating the Dementia Monster, noting that the core of his protocol for addressing AD are the things that continue to work for me.  However, he adds many, sometimes expensive tests and dietary supplements which have not been shown scientifically to improve cognition.  I have met brain health professionals who are really frustrated when people come in asking for the expensive tests of doubtful utility that Bredesen recommends.

Having heard this, I have wondered just how expensive the tests really are.  During the interview, Mercola said he estimated the tests to cost around $10,000.  Bredesen didn't dispute this number, but he said that his most basic tests could be done for about $1,000.  But the insurance companies won't pay for them.

Bredesen's initial research that led to development of his protocol involved only a handful of test subjects.  In his book, he documented a few more.  Now that he has licensed a number of clinics to implement his protocol, he says that he now has over 100 anecdotal success stories. 

I read The End of Alzheimer's, and in it Bredesen discussed the problems he has experienced in getting respect for his protocol from the research and academic community.  He believes the problem is that they all think in terms of a single silver bullet, but his protocol takes a systems approach requiring many factors to work together.  So he has not been able to get approval for a study that would be a candidate for a peer-reviewed journal.  In the book he said he believed that he would eventually receive the approval he needs, and in the interview he gave details about the genesis of a new study, naming the investigators.  So we will see.

At this point, my critique of Bredesen is that the success story anecdotes from his research and in his book all begin with the core domains we discuss in Beating the Dementia Monster.  He needs to prove that adding the expensive stuff will improve results.

They discussed something else that concerns me.  That is the potential for the explosion in the use of cell phones to, over time, create possibly catastrophic changes in brain chemistry.  On the one hand, the wavelength of microwaves from the phone are such that they are not expected to interact with atomic and subatomic particles in a way that might change them.  They should not cause electrons to change their energy levels or cause atoms to be ionized and thus not cause chemical reactions.  On the other hand, the inverse square law tells us that a fair amount of energy will pass through our brains when the phone is held up to our heads, and I suspect intuitively that it must have some consequence.  During the interview, they discussed some possible ways that microwaves could cause changes that could lead to AD.  But they acknowledged that these are speculative.