Transcription
[Music] I am a neonatologist, which is a physician that takes care of sick and premature newborns. But I'm talking about Alzheimer's disease tonight because my husband of 40 years, Steve, has early onset Alzheimer's disease.
Um, I came upon something on the internet, purely by chance, to help him that gave him a reprieve from the disease. But it was because of what I do for a living that I recognized it when I saw it. Whoa, geez.
Steve is a stay-at-home dad, and he worked for my practice as an accountant at home while I pursued my career as a neonatologist. Uh, at, but at age 51, Steve began having problems with his accounting. He began, uh, making payroll mistakes, missing tax deadlines, and then he couldn't remember if he'd been to the bank and the post office. But at first, this was attributed to depression.
But by 2004, he continued to have problems with his, uh, making accounting mistakes and with memory. And so he was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease at that point in time. By 56 years old, Steve could no longer do, do any accounting at all. He could no longer use a calculator, and he could not even do simple math. We found out that he couldn't read a map when he was driving home from Tallahassee one night, and he got lost and ended up on the other coast of Florida, about 3 hours away from home. So he had to give up driving shortly thereafter.
By age 58, Steve was on a downward spiral. He had tremors in his hands and in his jaw. He could no longer read due to a visual disturbance. His gait was slow and weird, and he could no longer run. His personality and sense of humor had disappeared, and he was much more likely to take his lawn tractor apart than to cut the grass with it. And so, uh, being on a downward spiral, we were desperate for something to help Steve.
And in May, May of 2008, a couple of new drugs became available for clinical trials. And so he was scheduled for screenings on two successive days. And I started thinking the night before, what if he gets accepted into both trials? We have to pick one. So I began to look for the risks and the benefits on the internet. And, um, came upon a third treatment, which was for a medical food called ac122 at that time. And it was, they claimed that it improved the memories and cognition in nearly half of people with Alzheimer's who were given this. But it didn't say what it was or what it did.
So I found their patent application online, and there in was a beautifully written description of an aspect of Alzheimer's disease that I was not familiar with. That is a type of diabetes of the brain. A group at Brown University in 2005 reported that when they looked at the brains of people who had died with Alzheimer's that did not have type 1 or type 2 diabetes, that they found insulin resistance and insulin deficiency in all of these brains. And they coined the term type 3 diabetes to indicate Alzheimer's disease. They further reported in 2008 that this happened in the earlier stages of the disease, and it became more severe and more widespread with each subsequent stage of the disease until it was throughout the brain.
Other researchers have reported that, uh, this may occur 10 to 20 years before symptoms even begin to appear in someone who is at risk for this disease. So with this means is that since glucose is the preferred and primary fuel for the brain and other organs, that, um, without insulin, glucose cannot get into cells. So the cells begin to malfunction and die, the neurons in the brain. And then over time, you begin to see symptoms.
But glucose is not the only fuel that the brain can use. When we go into starvation, within 36 or 48 hours, we use up the glucose that is stored in our body, and we begin to break down fat. And part of that fat is converted to ketone bodies in the liver. And ketone bodies can serve as an alternative fuel for brain cells and for other organs. And so here is an idea that use of an alternative fuel could bypass the problem of insulin resistance and insulin deficiency in the old time or brain.
But you don't have to be in starvation to raise ketone levels. Another way to do this is with the classic ketogenic diet. And, um, what this diet is, is a very high fat diet and a very low carbohydrate diet. And it has just enough protein to maintain lean body mass. And has been used successfully for more than 90 years in children with drug-resistant epilepsy. It has, um, actually some of these children have no seizures at all after having hundreds of seizures a day after starting this diet. And it's been used successfully more recently in adults as well. There are other forms of the ketogenic diet that people are more familiar with, the Atkins and South Beach diets, that are used, uh, for weight loss.
So back to the patent application, they cited research by Dr. Richard Beach from the, uh, National Institutes of Health in Rockville, Maryland, who has been studying ketone esters to treat Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. And he had found and reported in 2000 that more neurons survived in cell cultures when they were exposed to substances that cause Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease when the ketone body beta hydroxybutyrate was added to the mix. And so right around that same time, in 2000, Dr. Samuel Henderson had the brilliant insight that another way of getting ketosis, mild ketosis, from consuming medium chain triglycerides might be enough to improve cognition in people with Alzheimer's disease. And so he filed a patent application for ac122, which is simply medium chain triglyceride oil.
So what happens with medium chain triglycerides is when you consume foods that contain these, they're taken up directly from the intestine into the liver, and part of it is converted to ketones. And ketones are released into the circulation. They cross the blood brain barrier, and they're eagerly, eagerly taken up by brain cells, um, and provide, you know, the cells with, um, energy.
So this rang a bell with me because I'm a neonatologist. We used to use medium chain triglyceride oil to supplement the feedings of our premature newborns in the late '70s and early '80s to help them gain weight faster. And then the formula manufacturers began adding it to their infant formulas because they were trying to mimic human breast milk, which has 10 to 17% of the fats as medium chain triglycerides. If you look at any infant formula can today, virtually every one of them will have medium chain triglyceride oil or another oil that contains that on the label.
So reading through the patent application, I learned something else that I did not know up to that point. That medium chain triglyceride oil is extracted from coconut oil. And I did not know at that time that medium chain triglyceride oil was available over the counter. But I did know that I had seen coconut oil in the health food stores. So ac122 had completed phase 2 clinical trials, and they found that just with a single dose of MCT oil and also with prolonged use of MCT oil, that there was improved cognition and memory in nearly half the people with Alzheimer's that took it. And so it was approved by the FDA. It's a prescription medical food in the spring of 2009. But this was May of 2008. We were still a year away from this being available.
So, you know, obviously, this is something I wanted to use to try to treat my husband, if possible. I finished reading this patent application at about 1:00 a.m. the night before the screening, and he was scheduled at 8:00 a.m. So I didn't have time to run out and buy coconut oil. So we drove to St. Petersburg, and Steve screened for the trial, and he scored only 14 out of a simple 30-point memory test, and he needed 16 points to qualify for the trial. So he was not accepted, and we were very disappointed. And he was asked to draw a clock by the doctor there, a simple test for Alzheimer's. And as you can see, it was a poorly organized clock. It doesn't look at all like a clock, a few little random circles and a few numbers. And she told me that he was on the verge of severe Alzheimer's disease.
So driving home, I thought, what do we have to lose? And we, uh, went out of our way to Tampa and picked up some coconut oil at a health food store where I knew I had seen it. And when we got home, I got on the internet again, and I researched everything that I could about ketones, medium chain triglycerides, and coconut oil. And I found the composition of coconut oil, the fatty acid composition, and I learned that coconut oil is 60% medium chain triglycerides. So in the ac122 clinical trials, they had used 20 grams, and this equated to seven teaspoons of coconut oil.
So the following morning, I gave Steve seven teaspoons of coconut oil with his breakfast. And we went to the Byrd Institute here at the University of South Florida, and he screened again for a clinical trial. And this time, he scored 18 out of 30, needing 16 to qualify, and he, in fact, did qualify for this clinical trial. We were elated. And at that point, I didn't know if it was the coconut oil, prayers, or just good luck. But we decided we were going to keep it going. And Steve said many times after that that the light switch came back on in his spring that day.
So over the next weeks and months, uh, we began mixing MCT oil and coconut oil together. MCT oil gives higher levels, but coconut oil longer duration of ketones. And so we also increased to three servings a day, and eventually four, so that he would get ketones around the clock available to his brain. And what we saw during the first months of coconut oil, that his personality and sense of humor returned. He was much less depressed. His tremors resolved. He was able to start walking normally again, and even start running. His visual disturbance disappeared, and he was able to resume activities again, such as cutting the grass and mowing, uh, vacuuming the house without taking the things apart and losing the pieces.
So Steve had drawn a clock the day before he started the coconut oil, and then he drew clocks 14 and 37 days later that were amazingly much more organized than before. And, uh, this was reflected in other things that we were seeing with Steve as well. During the first two months of coconut oil, his mental status exam, the 30-point test, improved from 12 points about two weeks before when he had screened for a trial, to 20 points out of 30 about two months after starting coconut oil. So that's a very dramatic improvement in the score. And he did, in fact, enter a clinical trial at that point. They decided to let him in because this was only a food, how could it screw up their results?
So he had, uh, quite a bit of cognitive testing during that first year. And we found out later that he was on the placebo during the first 12 to 14 months of the study. It was a crossover trial. And what happened with Steve was that he actually improved by six points on a 75-point scale for cognitive testing, and he also improved by 14 points out of 78 points on the activities of daily living test. Other people who were on placebo during that year dropped by an average of six points on that same cognitive test that Steve had been scored for. He also had an MRI two years after starting coconut oil that was read as stable compared to the previous. And he had had a dramatic worsening from 2004 to 2008 on his, uh, MRI.
So getting back to May of 2008, by the fifth day, Steve's personality and his alertness were so much improved, and sense of humor, that I felt like I'd gotten my husband back. And we said to each other, our life has changed for the better. So I felt, you know, since Steve had improved so much, other people would improve too. And this is something that's on the shelf now. People don't shouldn't have to wait for a prescription medical food to come out a year from now that was already on the shelf.
So I began a letter writing campaign, and I, uh, sent it to many different politicians and media people. And I, you know, told them about ac122, that Steve was just one example of somebody that had improved, that this needed desperately needed and urgently needed clinical trials, but that it was available on the shelf now, and people could use it if they, they would just tell everybody about it. But I got no, uh, serious response to any of my letters. And so I put together an article in July of 2008 that I intended to distribute at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference to 5,000 researchers. They have an exhibit hall, but I was turned down for a table in their exhibit hall. So I began to distribute at health food stores and online.
And in the fall of 2008, the St. Petersburg Times ran a story about Steve and I. This went viral on the internet. So thereafter, I began to hear from other people who had tried coconut oil and/or MCT oil and was getting very many positive reports. I've collected almost 250 reports now, uh, from people, and about 90% of those are people who have had some type of improvement. And I realize people are less likely to email me if they did not have an improvement. But about two-thirds of these people reported some type of memory or cognitive improvement. But many others reported improvements in quality of life, recognition of family members again, uh, relief from depression, improved mood, and improved behavior, and, uh, relief from physical symptoms, you know, those kinds of things. And some of those are very hard to measure on tests.
So many months were spent writing a book to try to get this message out about ketones as an alternative to fuel for the brain, that this can be achieved through food, that ketone esters are in development, and that they urgently need to have clinical testing of both coconut oil and ketone esters. And one of the main critiques of my book was that this idea needs clinical trials. Well, my answer to that is, well, that was the whole point of writing my book. Without awareness of this kind of idea, how would clinical trials for coconut oil ever get done?
So keto esters are now in development at the National Institutes of Health, and also here at the University of South Florida. Ketone esters can raise ketone levels many times higher than what you can achieve with large amounts of coconut oil and MCT oil. There was a recent study that was published from the NIH by Dr. Richard Beach again, and this time they used ketone ester beta hydroxybutyrate in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, and they found that there was reduced plaque and tangle, which are two hallmarks of the disease in the brain, in these mice, and also improved memory and learning. So very exciting, uh, information.
And I'm also pleased to say that the University of South Florida, the Byrd Alzheimer's Institute, is beginning a study very soon of coconut oil and MCT oil in people with mild cognitive impairment to see if it will help relieve symptoms and also prevent progression to Alzheimer's disease. And just down the road here at another lab at the University of South Florida, they are studying ketogenic diets, including medium chain triglycerides and ketone esters in animals right now, to study oxygen toxicity, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, Lou Gehrig's disease, which is ALS, cancer, and wound healing. They may very well have some very exciting and promising results are coming out of this. And, um, they may very well be the ones to find a cure for cancer in this lab.
So if you or anyone that you know or love has Alzheimer's disease or another condition that involves decreased glucose uptake into the brain, or if you're at risk for one of these diseases, consumption of medium chain triglycerides on a daily basis could possibly bring about some improvement, a reprieve from the disease. Um, but while we are waiting for these clinical trials to be done, you know, for ketone esters, you can consume medium chain triglycerides in your diet. They are not available in the typical oils that we eat in our American diet, and that includes all oil and fish oil. But they are available in MCT oil, coconut oil, palm kernel oil, and in the milk fat of humans, goats, and cows. So if you're eating a typical American diet and you're consuming fat-free milk, you're getting virtually no medium chain triglyceride in your diet.
So medium chain triglycerides are just food. They're available on the shelf. And what do you have to lose?
[Applause]
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