Improving Quality of Life in Alzheimers and Dementia: A Functional Medicine Perspective

Discover how a personalized, functional medicine approach is changing the game in Lewy Body Dementia care. Learn about innovative approaches to managing Lewy Body Dementia through functional medicine principles, offering hope to patients and caregivers. #LewyBodyDementia #FunctionalMedicine #Healthcare

I often find myself delving into research about treatment options for devastating medical conditions when a loved one faces a health crisis. This week, I'm immersed in understanding Lewy Body Dementia, a condition that combines features of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

In the realm of Functional Medicine and Functional Nutrition, our approach is always centered around uncovering the root cause and stabilizes the body as a whole. We investigate what's behind the condition in each unique individual. This is why we place great importance on in-depth investigations, including comprehensive lab testing, a thorough health history analysis, scrutiny of food journals, lifestyle assessments, and an evaluation of potential toxic exposures. To craft effective protocols, we must first assess the complete health picture and understand the underlying factors driving the condition.

In the interview excerpt below, Dr. Hyman explains, "So I cleaned up her gut, got her blood sugar under control, and optimized her pathways related to methylation, B vitamin status, and hormonal support. I addressed her thyroid issues and low sex hormone levels, essentially fine-tuning her overall health from a Functional Medicine perspective. I couldn't predict the outcome, but by applying these foundational principles of gut health, hormonal balance, blood sugar control, mitochondrial function, and optimizing biochemical pathways crucial for brain health such as methylation, sulfation, and detoxification, she experienced remarkable improvement."

Prevention is Key

The patient whose story is shared below experienced a remarkable turnaround in her health by embracing the fundamental strategies we implement here at People + Planet Nutrition. If only she had incorporated these tools into her life decades earlier, perhaps she could have prevented her condition from escalating to such a distressing level.

If you are interested in preventing dementia or safeguarding your brain health, look no further. My Nourish + Flow program is designed to educate you on the necessary dietary and lifestyle adjustments. For a more personalized approach, my 1:1 private client work go deeper to rebalance digestion, blood sugar, detoxification, and hormone systems to set you up for more enjoyable future.

Excerpt (edited) from Dr. Mark Hyman on Lewy Body Dementia

I want to share an excerpt from The Doctor’s Farmacy podcast with Dr. Mark Hyman, a pioneer and renowned leader in the field of Functional Medicine on this topic of Lewy Body Dementia.

“Dr. Mark Hyman:

I’ve had a lot of opportunity to treat Lewy body patients, but the good news is there’s something you can do about it. Lewy body, for those people who don’t know what it is, is a form of dementia that’s a combo between Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. So it’s like dementia with a lot of motor features. So it affects this part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which controls motor function, but also has far reaching effects throughout the brain.

There’s no such thing as [one] dementia. There are dementias, and they’re all different, and they have different causes even, for example, Alzheimer’s may have very different causes.

Whether it’s inflammatory triggers, mold, toxins, Lyme, blood sugar issues, insulin, nutritional deficiencies, hormonal dysregulation. There’s all these things that drive brain dysfunction.

We had to think broadly about what the root causes are. So while on the pathology it may look the same, in other words, when you take someone’s brain, you cut it open after they die and you look at it, you’re going to see the same pattern of cellular dysfunction and the same kinds of pathology on the slides amongst all the people with Lewy body or amongst all the people with Alzheimer’s, amongst all the people with vascular dementia, but that doesn’t mean the causes are the same.

I recall one in particular who was quite disabled, who I got pretty late in the process, and in the functional medicine approach, even if I’ve never seen a case of this particular disease before, I know what to do because I’m not treating the disease, I’m treating the body, I’m treating the system, I’m creating health, and I’m removing all the impediments to health and adding in all the ingredients for health, but when I do that, the body’s innate healing system starts to activate. It starts to repair and start to renew and heal.

This patient was about 85 years old, a woman who really was struggling. When she was brought to me, she was unable to walk. She was in a wheelchair because of the motor dysfunction. She came to my office. We had to have three people pick her up and she was a little lady. We had three people who literally pick her up to stand on the scale to weigh her. She was unable to run her business affairs. She had really a very large successful business, and was on the board, and was heavily involved, and was just no longer functioning. She couldn’t go out anymore. She couldn’t socialize anymore. She was really home bound and wheelchair-ridden, wheelchair, is that ridden, ridden? Wheelchair bound, wheelchair bound, wheelchair bound. She really had trouble speaking.

So it turned out, even though she was thin, she was diabetic and her blood sugar was very poorly controlled because she ate a lot of carbohydrates. So she may not have been overweight, but she was over fat and under lean. In other words, she was what I would call metabolically obese normal weight.

She had also a lot of gut issues and had never really had normal bowel movements, was severely constipated, uses colonics and enemas and laxatives for years and years and years and years. Then she had all these weird other things. She had all these migratory rashes, all of her body, which were yeast infections on her skin, on her breasts and everywhere.

She also was really significantly nutritionally deficient in many, many nutrients, including B12, folate, B6. So she had tremendous gut issues, she had diabetes, and she had significant nutritional deficiencies and hormonal dysfunction.

So I looked at the whole picture and I said, “Well, let’s just start to rebuild your system from the ground up.” So the first thing we did was clean up her gut, and she turned out she had tremendous amounts of yeast from all the steroids and antibiotics she’d been on. She was severely constipated, which can go along with yeast overgrowth or we called SIFO, small intestinal fungal overgrowth, which is similar to SIBO, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. She was bloated, distended, uncomfortable.

So we got her gut normalized. I gave her an antifungal. I gave her probiotics. I gave her a whole gut repair program, gave her magnesium. I took away all the laxatives and got her on MCT oil, vitamin C, magnesium, which really helped bowel movements. So she started normalizing her gut, which is great.

Then we actually also addressed the blood sugar. So we put her on a modified ketogenic diet, extremely low carbohydrate, higher in fats, and the brain loves this, and particularly in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, there’s really good data showing that a ketogenic diet can be really helpful symptomatically, and I’ve had many other patients with Alzheimer’s, when they get pretty bad, I’ll often try a ketogenic diet when I see them slipping and it’s remarkable.

The other part of dementia, Parkinson’s in particular and Lewy body, is that it’s a mitochondrial problem, which is an energy problem. So there’s an energy deficit inside the cells, which makes it difficult to move and think into all the things we want to do. So I basically clean up her gut. I got her diet sorted to be extremely low glycemic, full of phytochemicals, super high in fat, very low sugar, starch, and her blood sugar normalized. Her gut normalized.

Then I started upregulating some of these B vitamin pathways that have to do with brain chemistry that can be contributing to dementia like B12 deficiency. She was on acid blockers, all kinds of drugs. I had to take her off of it. These people are in polypharmacy.

So I clean up her gut. I got her blood sugar under her control. I optimized her pathways around methylation, B vitamin status, and I also gave her some hormonal support. Her thyroid was off. Her sex hormones were low. So I basically just tuned her up. I just optimized her systems from a functional medicine perspective. I didn’t know what would happen.

I thought, “Oh, well, hopefully, she’ll feel better, at least she’ll be going to the bathroom and her blood sugar is controlled,” but it was a miracle. Literally a miracle. I went to visit her at her apartment in New York. I made a house call and I was shocked. She literally got up out of her wheelchair and she walked down the hall unassisted. I was like, “Holy cow!” Her verbal fluency increased. She was able to get back and do her business. She recorded another album. She wrote a book. It was like, “What happened to her?”

I really learned so much from this case because just by applying these foundational principles about restoring health in the gut, in hormones, in blood sugar, in mitochondria, and also optimizing these pathways around biochemistry that are so important for brain function that have to do with methylation, sulfation, detoxification, she really improved so dramatically.

So she was needing the pound of cure so it was a very intensive program, but she did it, and the results were really remarkable. I think that people out there listening need to be aware that while we’re seeing rise in case of dementia and Parkinson’s and Lewy body and it seems hopeless right now because traditional medicine just failed at this. There’s been I think over $2 billion of studies, over 400 clinical trials studying all sorts of drug interventions and every single one of them has failed. Even the new drug that “got approved” is joke. It’s super expensive. It doesn’t really make that much difference.

“Oh, I’m going to keep you out of the nursing home, extra three months. That’s a blockbuster drug.” No, it’s terrible. It’s like, “That’s not a metric.” So the metric is, can you get back to life? Can you do the things you like to do? Can you socialize? Can you walk? Can you talk? Can you think? Can you be engaged in your life in a meaningful way? That’s the result she got.

Conclusion

As you can see, a whole body, Funcitonal medicine, deep rebalancing approach is the best bet for addressing serious health conditions such as dementia. What I have found in my practice is that it is much easier to make these upgrades to diet, lifestyle, gut health, sugar handling and detoxification systems earlier rather than waiting until you’re in a full blown health emergency such as that described above.

Middle age, or earlier, is the time to prepare for prevention. If you are ready to take the next step towards improved brain function in old age, check out our Nourish + Flow: Stable Foundations program today! If you need deeper clinical support and lab testing protocols, we also offer 1:1 client programs.