Transcription
Is glucosamine poisoning your family? You may be entitled entitled to the truth. The headlines are juicy and frenzied, as they often are, as they claim that this study shows that a popular joint supplement, glucosamine, is implicated criminally in raising the risk of Alzheimer's disease, a form of dementia, brain disorder. Is that true though? Well, we can look at the study itself, but I'd like to bring in several other studies as well.
The study causing all the drama assessed the topic from multiple angles. First, how did they land on glucosamine? Isn't that random? Why not omega-3s or creatine or aspirin? When we take human brains from Alzheimer's patients, I promise they've already passed on, we aren't taking them from people who are still living, and we run a series of research diagnostics called metabolomics, lipidomics, glycomics, which are huge tests that identify which molecules, as metabolites, fats, or sugars, are found in the brain. We see some striking results. Take a look for yourself. You can ignore everything up top. It's just describing how these tests work. Just look at the brain slices on the left and right for each of type of test. Notice that the coloration for metabolomics and lipidomics between Alzheimer's disease brain samples and normal brain samples, uh meaning that these are people that do not have Alzheimer's disease, but they died, is roughly the same. Then look at the coloration for glycomics. There's a big difference with several hotbeds in the Alzheimer's disease condition. So, all this tells us is that there may be significant sugar molecule differences between Alzheimer's disease and normal brain samples, but it doesn't tell us which molecules yet.
Ultimately, after they identified which class of molecules, sugars, which are ultimately attached to proteins called glycosylation, then through some additional measures in the brain, looking at the space outside the brain cells, as well as inside the brain tissue itself, including some additional experiments in animals, glucosamine was shown to be the major target of interest. A big difference between the Alzheimer's disease brains and the normal brains. Of course, that's all pretty interesting and we clearly now have a culprit for the difference between an Alzheimer's disease and a normal brain. But, that human brain data is what's known as cross-sectional data, meaning that we are only comparing the brains at one point in time and looking for differences. That doesn't inform us if this relationship is long-standing, as in do people who consume more glucosamine regularly have an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease? The answer is yes and no.
When we separate people by whether they consume daily glucosamine supplements or not, and then we look at the risk of mortality first, there's an interesting distinction. The higher the lines remain, the lower the risk of death. The orange line is the people who do not supplement with glucosamine and the blue line is the people who do supplement with glucosamine. You can clearly see that the people who supplement with glucosamine are worse off after the 10 years studied. But, what if I throw a wrench into the equation by introducing these data to you? These data are from identical conditions, but there's no established relationship between glucosamine consumption and increased risk of death. So, how can that be? How can glucosamine consumption be linked to increased risk of death and at the same time also not be linked to the increased risk of death as both data come from the same study.
Before I touch on that, if you're interested in understanding far more on the cellular mechanisms of how glucosamine affects our brain based on other data from this study or more in-depth analysis on glucosamine and dementia as a whole and the counterintuitive results coming from some other studies that I analyzed, then check out my full analysis which is part of the Physio Insider membership. You'll get everything in an article format and a video format. You'll get access to my once-a-month Insider podcast that covers all of my investigations for the month along with actionable takeaways. You get much more than that, but I don't want to take up too much more of your time. So, if you're interested in checking all of that out, then use the link in the description. I hope to see you there. I'm a very active Insider member myself.
Returning to these counterintuitive data. The first graph that I showed you is in people who already have Alzheimer's disease and the second graph is in people who are experiencing mild cognitive impairment, which is an early stage before dementia actually sets in, not necessarily Alzheimer's disease. This tells us that the timing may matter at least from a mortality perspective. But, we aren't just concerned with mortality. We're also interested to find out about the main point of the study, which was to link glucosamine to an accelerated rate of Alzheimer's disease as well. In fact, they show that here. This time, the higher the lines go, the greater the progression from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. So, ideally, we'd like those lines to remain low. Unfortunately, we again see that glucosamine seems to be an increased risk for this transition from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. The takeaway here is that at this point in the analysis, it says that the glucosamine may not increase the risk of mortality in people suffering from mild cognitive impairment, but it is linked to a more rapid progression to Alzheimer's disease and people who have Alzheimer's disease are linked to an increased risk of mortality.
So don't close the video yet. I did promise that we'd be looking at some other research and I'll keep it short as I can. Obviously, I was interested to figure out if other research has looked at something similar. I found several other studies that look at the relationship between glucosamine and dementia as a whole including Alzheimer's disease. I'll cut to the chase, but if you want a more detailed breakdown of glucosamine on vascular dementia, Alzheimer's disease and more, then check out my full analysis for the insiders. All three studies disagree with the study that we just went over. They either identify no relationship between glucosamine and Alzheimer's disease or a reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease from glucosamine consumption.
Of course, this introduces a new potentially frustrating fissure in the research literature, but the answer is actually quite harmonious between all four studies. The three studies that I just referenced excluded people with reported dementia or mild cognitive impairment at the beginning of each study. The main scary study that we've been discussing has been focused on people who already have at least mild cognitive impairment. This tells us, although I should warn that we would need more data to make sure that glucosamine consumption is not linked to greater Alzheimer's disease risk or even mild cognitive impairment in people who are healthy. It also tells us that there's a possibility that people that have been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's may accelerate issues of Alzheimer's disease with glucosamine consumption.
I know I said I would keep things short, but I do have one more critical piece of information to share with you. The main scary study that we've been discussing did some adjustments for potential confounding factors that could explain the relationship between glucosamine and mortality and Alzheimer's disease progression. But, those adjustments were limited to age, sex, and demographics. It's still possible that the true risk is due to being overweight or frail or socioeconomic status or education or diet quality or some other supplement or I don't know, a multitude of other possibilities. I think that their study is strengthened by the mechanistic data that they provide including the cross-sectional brain data that we went over, but it's still not foolproof. That means that with more data, we may discover that glucosamine is not the true risk to Alzheimer's disease progression. As it stands, there is now a yellow flag on glucosamine supplementation for people who have been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease. There is no good evidence this applies to the majority of individuals even at the same age who are cognitively healthy.
I hope this clears things up for you and I look forward to more data on the topic in the future. If you're interested in more on Alzheimer's disease and dementia, then check out this video right here. Thanks for tuning in as always, I deeply appreciate it and I'm really excited to speak with you in that next one right here. You could quell my excitement by just, you know, clicking on that next video right now. I'll catch you over there.