Today I review, link to, and excerpt from Lancet Neurology‘s article Can We Trust [The Book] The End Of Alzheimer’s. The book is by Dr.Dale Bredesen. [Full-Text HTML] [Full-Text PDF]. Joanna Hellmuth, MD, 1Memory and Aging Center, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA. Published in final edited form as: Lancet Neurol. 2020 May;19(5):389–390. doi: 10.1016/S1474-4422(20)30113-7
All that follows is from the above resource.
When faced with diseases that are currently incurable, like Alzheimer’s disease, it is common for patients and family members to look for hope outside of the physician’s office. A diagnosis can be frightening, and it is understandable that some people are motivated to pursue any intervention claiming a beneficial effect. As direct-to-consumer interventions for dementia have flourished, so has the need to critically evaluate the evidence supporting these options.
As a cognitive neurologist at a large memory centre, my colleagues and I are often approached about the book The End of Alzheimer’s by Dale Bredesen. The book reviews his eponymous protocol, subtitled the First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline. The Bredesen protocol offers a plan combining several dietary supplements with detailed lifestyle changes and other targeted interventions (eg, against inflammation and toxins). The protocol has grown in popularity, even with high out-of-pocket cost to implement, and the book has appeared on many bestseller lists including those of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon.com. Physicians who recommend the Bredesen protocol often cite the three published studies by Bredesen, as well as his affiliations with respected academic medical centres. The Bredesen protocol makes strong claims of efficacy despite no other approaches being shown to definitively prevent or reverse cognitive decline; it is therefore necessary to carefully evaluate the existing clinical data to determine the strength of the evidence that guides the protocol.
Please carefully review the rest of this excellent article. The author concludes that the answer to the article’s question is no.
