Thanks for your further input - fascinating information!
Say, I am really curious - are you following the research with CAFFEINE, that there will soon be human trials with Alzheimer’s patients because a group of researchers actually reversed Alzheimer’s in a bunch of rats OR mice, by giving them the equivalent of what in human terms would be 5 cups of coffee a day.
The articles mentioned that by giving caffeine to humans that the plaques in the bloodstream immediately decreased, just like in the lab animals.
I was going to buy STOCK in whomever manufactures No-Doz, until I determined that the generic forms of caffeine are just as good as the brand name.
Several other freepers are taking caffeine supplements, too — in one of the Alzh.D threads, a poster mentioned that Vitacost carried the least expensive caffeine.
It’s my impression, though that ANY type of caffeine pill is much less expensive than its equivalent in actual coffee — a very expensive commodity, indeed. :)
Also — do you happen to have any idea why ALCOHOL, as in alcoholic drinks, is starting to recur as a factor in elderly adults NOT getting any form of dementia? Is alcohol a ‘major’ anti-inflammatory?
Ooowee, did you pick a couple of enigmas: Alzheimer’s, and alcohol.
Alzheimer’s is one of those diseases so loaded with what looks like obvious clues that it should be easy to solve, but finding a solution to it is terribly difficult.
For example, in some ways it seems to be just the opposite of schizophrenia, almost mutually exclusive of each other. If someone gets one, they almost never get the other. The blood of schizophrenics is loaded with naturally occurring nitrous oxides, in Alzheimer’s patients, far less than normal, almost none. But then, a dead end. The parallels and opposites just seems to be coincidental. Maybe.
Metals, such as aluminum, seemed to be a “smoking gun” with Alzheimer’s. Very obviously. But they didn’t pan out, either. No real relationship. One of its big symptoms are plaque in the brain. But the plaque can be treated, yet the Alzheimer’s remains.
The same with genetics. Childhood diseases. Adult and family diseases. Ethnic groups. Diet, exercise, intelligence, even age. They all seem to have *some* relationship, but it doesn’t work when you check it out.
So, they keep looking.
As far as alcohol goes, I once listened to a very entertaining rant by a biochemical psychiatrist against alcohol. In short, the brain has a lot of minute chemicals, perhaps hundreds (we don’t know), that are immensely powerful, and very interrelated with each other. Some of them only last a fraction of a second but can change our lives.
And alcohol is the only known substance that can mess them all up.
He would work with a patient for months with a whole selection of very specific drugs, trying to find the one that would help them out. And then they would go on a drinking bender, and everything would be scrambled. So they would have to start over.
Take these hundreds of brain chemicals, add the 50 or so liver chemicals, the 150 or so cytokines, the various hormones (only a decade ago we discovered that the heart actually secretes a small amount of a hormone—what it does, we don’t know.) And you’ve got a puzzle on your hands.
One scientist pointed out that the reason everything is so complicated is because people are too cold. “If we were just 200 degrees warmer, everything, all these chemical processes, would be easy!”