What do Alzheimer’s disease and cancer have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out – and it’s the patients who suffer.
Chronic diseases as Big Pharma cash cows
On the surface, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer aren’t much alike. True, both are chronic conditions with an often bleak outlook for those affected, but the underlying disease processes and risk factors are quite different – not least because cancer, unlike Alzheimer’s, manifests in a bewildering variety of ways.
Take a step back, however, and the similarities quickly snap into focus. The incidence of both Alzheimer’s and many types of cancer are on the increase worldwide. Mainstream medicine considers both cancer and Alzheimer’s as largely ‘diseases of ageing’, despite paying lip service to additional factors, such as diet, lifestyle and environmental pollution.
Prevention overlooked
Furthermore, the mainstream has little time for preventative strategies for either cancer or Alzheimer’s. Mainstream ‘prevention’ of Alzheimer’s appears to mean giving drugs to healthy people in order to prevent the development of the neurofibrillary tangles implicated in the disease process. Of £21 million recently earmarked for Alzheimer’s/dementia research in the UK, not one penny was for prevention. It’s a similar picture at the UK’s largest Alzheimer’s research charity. Approved treatments for both conditions feed directly into the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry: chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer, and drugs like donepezil, rivastigmine and galantamine for Alzheimer’s. And much as with cancer, so-called complementary or alternative treatments for Alzheimer’s are given short shrift by the patient organisations and charities that reflect mainstream medical thinking.
One avenue of treatment for Alzheimer’s disease that is definitely considered complementary or alternative is therapy using vitamins and nutrients, such as vitamins B12 and B6 and folate. The UK Alzheimer’s Society, for example, doesn’t even list them as treatments, merely mentioning them in passing.
Nutrition for Alzheimer’s prevention and treatment
This is a huge shame, because research results using these precise nutrients have been highly promising – and, since the most prominent results were linked to a high-dose formulation made by Big Pharma and intended for prescription-only use, we can expect the situation to change fairly soon. Other promising directions include the omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Although human clinical trial results of DHA have so far been mixed, that does not rule out a role in Alzheimer’s prevention. Many orthodox medics, still stuck in the outdated mindset of the cholesterol hypothesis, dismiss exciting early evidence on the benefits of the medium-chain triglycerides found in coconut oil for Alzheimer’s disease patients.
Time for a new approach
The saying, “There’s no money in prevention,” applies to Alzheimer’s just as much as it applies to cancer. And since there’s not much more money in things like coconut oil or DHA, it’s unlikely the mainstream research institutions will be dipping into the moth-laden recesses of their wallets any time soon. Let’s hope that the promising research strands covered briefly in this article are followed-up soon by a smaller, innovative player – before Big Pharma’s products become the only game in town.
Comments
your voice counts
brainbox
08 May 2013 at 11:41 pm
let the sunshine in
http://www.vitamindwiki.com/Alzheimers-Cognition+-+Overview
Peter Fosdike http://www.moringaharvest.co.uk
09 May 2013 at 11:29 am
We would love to see more work into the effects of Moringa Oleifera on Alzheimer's. There is some good positive work going on. But the money is there yet to pay for large scale research. Because it is natural and grows on trees drugs companies are not going to want to look at this.
One bit of work has been done here
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=moringa%20alzheimer
and we are trying to collect out own evidence and resources
http://www.moringaharvest.co.uk/moringa/?q=moringa_benifits
Anyone who wants to help should contact us. The rest of the world has know about Moringa for generations but the West loves pills!
Martin Waddell http://www.naturalplantsolutions.co.uk/Projects
08 December 2014 at 6:13 pm
An interesting article, but mistaken in its statement that galanthamine is a "drug". It's true through largely synthesis, galanthamine has been corralled into the pharmaceutical industry's paddock and produced at vast and unnecessary profit under its various prescriptive names - remynyl and revastigmine.
However, it is a naturally occurring alkaloid in many plants of the Amaryllidaceae family and has a long place in herbal medicine in Eastern Europe and other cultures. It is available without prescription in mosts countries as a food supplement, but there seems to be s dramatic shortage and in my opinion over pricing of it through this channel also.
Now with the patent passing (how it was ever granted since it's not a novel compound, I don't know perhaps another example of the persuasive lobbying power of big pharma) some time back we are working off the back of EU and UK Gov't DEFRA funding to produce a source based on growing a key variety of daffodil at high altitude. We hope next year to be in a position to offer the pure natural source of botanical galanthamine to a much needed market at a far lower price point even than existing food supplement sources.
Totally in support of legitimate prevention/intervention, but right now with the number of alzheimers sufferers projected to double every 20 years and a cure a long way out of sight, botanical galanthamine offers a real and already well proven and crucial delay in symptoms in mild to moderate cases.
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