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2009-08-26 Thomas B Shea PhD Alzheimers Disease

Alzheimer's Disease Treated With A Novel Nutraceutical
Formulation Improves Cognition and Mood

An Interview with Thomas B. Shea, M.D.

August 26, 2009, By Kirkham R. Hamilton, PA-C
© copyright 2009, Prescription 2000, Inc.
www.prescription2000.com

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KIRK HAMILTON: Welcome to Staying Healthy Today, a health-oriented radio show committed to bringing you key experts in the fields of nutrition, prevention and integrative medicine.

Hi. My name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today. Our mission is simple: To provide you credible and usable health information from interviews and our educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.

Today's show topic is "Improving Mood And Cognition In Early Alzheimer's Disease Using A Vitamin And Nutraceutical Supplement." Today's guest is Dr. Thomas B. Shea, professor and director of the Center For Cellular Neurobiology and Neurodegeneration Research at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Massachusetts. Dr. Shea's expertise is in cell biology for which he earned a Ph.D. at Northeastern University. Dr. Shea's research interests are the causes of Alzheimer's disease and other related neurodegenerative diseases. His research shows that Alzheimer's disease can arise from a combination of genetics, diet and environmental stress.

So it's with great pleasure that I introduce Dr. Shea and thank you so much for taking time out to come on the show.

DR. THOMAS SHEA: It's a pleasure. Thank you.

KIRK HAMILTON: So tell me. A lot of people think that Alzheimer's disease is just something we're going to get as we get old, it's inevitable and it has nothing to do with lifestyle and environment. How did you first become involved, number one in thinking about Alzheimer's disease to study, and number two branching out into thinking that the combination of diet, environment and genetics played a role?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: There's a long answer to that. I started as a basic neurobiologist. What does that mean? Looking at the individual nerve cells and how they survive, how they develop. During those studies it became obvious that the same things that help nerve cells develop are the things that kind of unwind in diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. And the same processes can accompany normal aging but they're more harsh in Alzheimer's disease. They're more abrupt. It is true in the way you mentioned that Alzheimer's may be out there for all of us. One of the reasons this is becoming more and more evident as we live longer and longer is that the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease doubles for every decade of life beyond age 65. So, for example, 10% of the people age 65 or older have clinically diagnosed Alzheimer's disease. And there's still some of us walking around that it hasn't been diagnosed in yet. Twenty percent of the people age 75 or greater have Alzheimer's disease, 40% of people age 85 or greater have Alzheimer's disease, and a whopping 80% of us age 95 years of age or older have Alzheimer's disease. So the very next iteration is over 100%.

KIRK HAMILTON: So it is a function then obviously of aging. So how do you incorporate, can we reduce some of the sequelae of it or can we slow it down?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: Definitely. And the reason it is a function of aging is our brain cells are not replaced or they're replaced at a very, very small level. People nowadays hear a lot about stem cells and how they may be able to help us replace body parts including brain cells in time. That may happen in the future. It's certainly not happening now. So as we live longer and longer we all come on a sliding scale. We all live to different ages. Some of us are going to pass away...some at 90. We're all on a different scale and Alzheimer's disease for us is out there somewhere at a different scale. So I could present with Alzheimer's disease at 60 years of age. You could present it at 80 years of age. Should you pass away before 80 well Alzheimer's disease would never show up but it's still out there.

KIRK HAMILTON: Can you tell us then what are some of the things that happen to the neurons or the brain in Alzheimer's disease? What are the dysfunctions that occur?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: The nature of the dysfunctions are really imbalance. Things going wrong. Imagine a kitchen where you don't take the trash out. Well the trash is going to pile up. And for a while that's not so bad. But eventually it's gonna prevent you from being able to cook or move things around. So that's the kind of thing that goes wrong. It's not infection. It's no magic bullet from somewhere else. It's things in cells that are not replaced in our body. It's simply wearing out.

KIRK HAMILTON: Is that a function of then not getting enough, let's say energy to the nerve cell or is it a lack of protection from outside stimuli such as heavy metals or what is it?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: In a way it's all of those that kind of spiral together and I'm still trying to get at the first part of your first question which is what we can or can't do about Alzheimer's disease. Since we're living longer and since we can't replace brain cells it's incumbent upon us to treat them as well as we can. Brain cells use a lot of energy so they're very susceptible to anything that diminishes our energy or oxidative stress, that is the lack of antioxidants. So taking a lot of vitamins, eating right, exercising our brain, these are essential to keep that particular organ, the one that's not gonna be replaced like our skin. We get cut, we can simply patch it up. We can't do this in our brain. So it's incumbent upon us to do the best we can to keep those processes at bay.

KIRK HAMILTON: How does the brain cell become energy deficient? I mean, we have excess calories in this country so it must be some other description or biochemistry...

DR. THOMAS SHEA: Very well said. It's not just in terms of eating. It's in terms of eating right. And if any cell in our body is deficient in antioxidants it's going to pile up some damage. Oxidative stress is a funny term. Not everyone understands it. The way I like to explain it is a rusty nail. A rusty nail is undergoing oxidative stress. It's being burned. Or if you take a bite of an apple and put it down on the counter and leave it there it turns brown. The apple is essentially rusting and proteins in our cells will also rust if we don't have enough antioxidants. And once again what's that cell that's going to last and last your whole lifetime? Brain cells. So if it accumulates rust it's got to take a large amount of energy to try to fight it off. And even if we're consuming more food than we need, it's got to be the right kind of foods. It's got to have a lot of antioxidants to keep that brain cell healthy.

KIRK HAMILTON: What do healthy aging cultures do, such as let's say the Okinawans or Sardinians and those Blue Zone populations, do to keep their mental faculties there and not get Alzheimer's as rapidly as the Western...?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: Some of it is genetics and some of it is environment. There are forms of genes that place us more at risk for cancer or heart disease or Alzheimer's disease and other such diseases than perhaps another population or another group. But it also comes down to stress, the environment and diet. So I could have a gene that places me more at risk but if I'm doing everything I can in terms of diet and supplements that gene's bad influence will be pushed into the background and may never manifest.

KIRK HAMILTON: So you've done a study or a couple of studies, excuse me, more than one and you've used a nutraceutical product that you've developed. Could you explain first what a nutraceutical is? And then you have a variety of components, folic acid, vitamin B12, vitamin E, SAMe, N-acetyl-cyseine and acetyl-L-carnitine in that. Can you kind of explain your studies?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: Yes. Very simply, the word nutraceutical is something we need but we can make it. The magic term vitamin is reserved for something we can't make. So we have three vitamins in there and three nutraceuticals. We can make them, but we can't possibly make enough to keep our brain healthy. Especially as we age. So we've got to eat some of it. What we did is we worked for some 15 years with brain cells in culture and mouse models of Alzheimer's disease, that is mice genetically engineered to act as if, and show symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and we studied various combinations of vitamins and supplements and we came up with this as the best combination we had. These six ingredients worked together very well. Without going into chemical detail we'll think of them as a team of horses that pulls a wagon. Vitamin E protects brain cells from new oxidative attack Folic acid and N-acetyl-cyseine get inside the brain cell and protect it against oxidative attack that's already started. So vitamin E alone, for example, can't do the job. If any brain cell is already affected vitamin E is essentially useless for it. Folic acid and N-acetyl-cyseine get in there and they help that guy. And like you said before, energy...acetyl-L-carnitine provides a lot of energy to brain cells and again it's not just caloric energy. It's specific energy that keep brain cells functioning as they need to. S-adenosyl methionine helps turn on our own antioxidants that we have inside us that can get a little bit depleted while the brain cells are trying to fight off the ravages of Alzheimer's.

KIRK HAMILTON: We have vitamin B12 and S-adenosyl methionine. Are you trying to modulate methylation in the brain with these substances?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: Actually yes. Methylation is a very important process. It does a number of amazing things. It protects our DNA so it keeps our genes functioning and in good shape. It is essential for a lot of metabolic processes and many people don't know it. And, I didn't know a lot about it until I started putting all of these together and then I ended up wondering a lot more. But for brain cell health, methylation is kind of a little currency in the background. A little money exchange and it keeps all the processes moving along at a very necessary rate.

KIRK HAMILTON: Now you put these products together in one, or maybe one or two pills I'm not sure. And I'm looking at some of the dosages and B12 seems very small with 6 mcg, and 30 IU of vitamin 30 is, you know, on the smaller end at least as supplementation goes, and the rest are pretty normal supplement doses. Now where did those come from those doses?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: Great question. We used the recommended daily allowance for the three vitamins or less, and we used dosages for the nutraceuticals that have already been available over-the-counter for quite some time. Each one of these ingredients has been studied in clinical trials by other people, by other scientists and labs prior to this time. Each agent on it's own has either a marginal effect or a very, or no real measurable effect. It looks like it's gonna help, but it doesn't really do the job. And it's for the reasons I was mentioning. Vitamin E has a very limited repertoire of what it can do. So putting these together was something novel and in doing so we had to be cautious so we took levels that have no side effects in prior studies, that have been available over the counter, have been around for a long time and we essentially went in with a low dose of everything. We have seen great effects. It is possible someone could use a higher dose of this. We haven't investigated that. We will in time, but that's the rationale for the dosages we used.

KIRK HAMILTON: Can you tell me or tell the audience about your studies. I have two here in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias using your nutraceutical and what are the effects?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: Okay. We've done three studies. We did a study with early stage Alzheimer's disease. We did a study with late stage Alzheimer's disease and we did a study with healthy adults that had no evidence of any memory problems. When we studied early stage Alzheimer's disease we saw improvement within three to six months. We didn't anticipate improvement. We were hoping like anyone hopes with an Alzheimer's disease treatment just to hold that disease in check. Just to delay the cognitive decline. Just to keep the person's mood stabilized. We actually saw improvement within three to six months and that improvement held ground for two and a half years. The study was terminated after two and a half years so I'm not saying that things dropped but these people improved and they held ground for two and a half years. The improvement was both in cognition and their own ability to think and carry out simple tasks and their family caregivers noted improvement in their mood in terms of agitation, irritability, sleeping through the night. These are very, very serious behavioral parameters that accompany Alzheimer's disease and they're often the things that tear the family apart. In a late stage study, that is with people that already had very severe Alzheimer's disease, we didn't see improvement but we saw people hold ground for six months versus a placebo.

KIRK HAMILTON: How did the subjects take these? Now you have an Alzheimer's disease patient. Maybe their memory isn't as good as it should be. Was the compliance good and was it one pill, two pills or three pills?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: It's two pills. The dosage is split into two pills and it has to be because there's so many ingredients. The pills are identical so every one in the study had either a family caregiver who was responsible for monitoring the compliance or in the late stage study these people were in nursing homes so the staff would monitor compliance.

KIRK HAMILTON: Would there be any advantage or were these individuals ever studied for some of the levels of these vitamins or nutraceuticals beforehand and afterwards or any other metabolic tests?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: No we didn't do that. We didn't do that because these are the first studies and they were small. We also did a study with healthy adults where we had some 150 people and those people although they had no memory issues, picked up by about 50% in response time and recall on our various cognitive tests and we showed that to be reversible. So this is along the lines of your compliance. After a few months we withdrew the pills from everybody and those people settled back to the level they were at before. If we then gave them the pills again, they resumed the same level of improvement.

KIRK HAMILTON: These results were for early Alzheimer's disease. How about later Alzheimer's disease?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: I was just saying in later Alzheimer's disease we don't see improvement but we saw stabilization. That is people stopped declining for six months.

KIRK HAMILTON: You know what I've found to be very instructive when I looked at the studies, you actually have pictures of Alzheimer's disease patients drawing different pictures and structures and those simple graphics to me said a lot.

DR. THOMAS SHEA: They do because if someone - if we're thinking about a family. Not scientists, not doctors and someone's at home thinking about their mother, or their spouse and you just show them a graph of you know this is improved, that hasn't. It's very difficult to comprehend so we put up some pictures of some of the actual tests that people do. For example we asked someone to draw the face of a clock. It's sounds like a very simple function but someone with Alzheimer's disease will have severe problems drawing that entire clock and putting the hands on it and making it say a certain time.

KIRK HAMILTON: When you say neurodegenerative diseases when I look at this product I look at what your research is doing. It's not just for Alzheimer's disease. Can you share with us how it might else be used?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: It may have a nice effect for aging as our heart also ages and isn't replaced. We're currently doing some studies with motor neuron disease or Lou Gehrig's disease and we've only worked with mice so far but it seems to have a very profound effect also on helping the nerve cells that run our muscles. Those are the ones that have problems in motor neuron disease or Lou Gehrig's disease. It seems to have some very good effects on keeping those nerve cells healthy as well. So in time we will see if there are further applications of this.

KIRK HAMILTON: Would you elaborate on, let's say we have this supplement or a similar supplement that everybody's taking as they age for their brains. But what would you look for as a preventive lifestyle if you can pick out things with regard to diet and environment that can help protect brain function. And can you also exercise your brain?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: You certainly can exercise your brain. I'll get to that in a second. Eating not as much red meat as some of us may like to. Eating green vegetables. Drinking juice. A little bit of wine is good for you. It actually provides some antioxidants and healthy compounds that come right from the grapes. But fish as a major portion of a diet. Vegetables are great. And a multivitamin is essential, because we simply don't get enough vitamins these days however well we eat. And finally exercising your brain like any muscle is very important. If someone likes crossword puzzles they should do the crossword puzzles. If they like that Sudoku, do that. Go dancing. Playing music. Stay active as you age and especially if a family member is showing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease or has been diagnosed, try not to let them just sit. Encourage them. Do the crossword puzzles with them. Keep them active. Watch televisions shows that make you think like the Nova programs or things like that.

KIRK HAMILTON: How about environmental factors? It's kind of a difficult thing to assess but do you have any opinions on that?

DR. THOMAS SHEA: It's very, very difficult to assess but we can look at it this way. Alzheimer's disease arises from some combination of genetics, nutritional deficiencies and environment and no one of those three risk factors can account for all the cases. So there are at least two things going on. The most strongly associated gene, that is very strongly associated with Alzheimer's disease can only account for some 40 to 50% so there's still another thing going on. You can have a gene that places you at risk but that makes it a 50% chance of Alzheimer's not 100% chance.

KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. This is Dr. Thomas Shea from the Center for Cellular Neurobiology and Neurodegeneration Research at the University of Massachusetts.

So in closing I want to thank you Dr. Shea for your great work and keep up with this partial solution to a problem that's not going to go away with our aging population. So thank you for coming.

DR. THOMAS SHEA: Thanks very much.

KIRK HAMILTON: And I want to thank you the audience today for listening on this edition of Staying Healthy Today Radio. And remember until next time Stay and Be Well.

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