This is your brain on diabetes drugs

The top fear for my patients is Alzheimer’s disease — hands down. And I can’t really blame them.

No one is immune to this threat. (Heck, I’m getting up there in years myself.) Which is why I’m always looking for ways to keep the brain sharp and healthy.

If you’ve been a reader of mine for a little while, I don’t need to remind you that metabolic health is another primary focus of my work and practice. So needless to say, a new study showing that diabetes drugs reduce the noticeable effects of Alzheimer’s really caught my attention.

Microcirculation is the missing link

This research was done on cadavers so that researchers could study the microcirculation of the brain.

(As I’ve mentioned before, microcirculation is the tiny network of blood vessels and capillaries that carries oxygen and nutrients to all your body parts, including your brain.)

This essential system suffers a lot of damage in people with diabetes. In fact, it’s the underlying cause behind all diabetic complications, like kidney disease, erectile dysfunction, hypertension, and slow wound healing… just to name a few.

Naturally, researchers assumed that the brains of subjects who died with dementia and diabetes would show more hallmark Alzheimer’s lesions — like amyloid plaques and tau tangles — than dementia patients without diabetes.

(Although this isn’t necessarily true. Because as I’ve mentioned many times before, these brain plaques and tangles are likely the body’s way of trying to repair itself, rather than the actual cause of the disease…)

Researchers also looked at whether Alzheimer’s-related changes were less pronounced in the brains of patients on diabetes meds of any kind. And they made a striking observation…

Analysis showed a number of abnormalities and genetic alterations in Alzheimer’s patients. But, the number of abnormally expressed genes was significantly lower in diabetic Alzheimer’s patients who had received antidiabetic drug treatment.

In fact, if a subject had both Alzheimer’s and type 2 diabetes, and had received treatment for the latter, their brain appeared to be similar to a person without either condition.

A new use for an old discovery

The genetic changes in patients with both diabetes and Alzheimer’s were centralized in the parahippocampal gyrus. This is an area of the brain essential to memory encoding and retrieval.

The fact that diabetes treatments were able to reduce these changes in the brain suggests that they were able to reverse or prevent some of the microvascular alterations behind Alzheimer’s development.

This research also suggests that people with diabetes are more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s (and other forms of dementia) in general.

In other words, what we have here is yet another illness we can attribute to blood sugar problems… and more importantly, one we can prevent with proper blood sugar control.

This is hardly a new discovery. In fact, many people in the anti-aging community already use the diabetes drug metformin in their attempts to stop the hands of Father Time. So really, we’re just looking at further proof that this strategy works.

But the researchers point out that we shouldn’t be giving diabetes drugs to people without diabetes — a curious objection from the same mainstream medical community that would put statins in the water supply if they could…

Predictably, they suggest that new drugs need to be developed instead. Which means that this potentially dementia-preventing “breakthrough” will just end up on a shelf for the next ten years, until someone figures out a way to profit off of it.

The good news, of course, is that you don’t need medication to manage your blood sugar and reverse diabetes — or to keep your brain sharp as a tack. In fact you can use specific nutrition, fitness, and lifestyle interventions instead.

Fortunately, I’ve outlined just how to do this in my effective, drug-free guides for preventing, treating, or reversing diabetes and dementia.

Click here to learn more about my Metabolic Repair Protocol — my drug-free plan for preventing and reversing type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, and metabolic syndrome. And click here to learn more about my Drug-Free Protocol for Reversing Alzheimer’s and Dementia — my all-natural plan to protect and restore memory, strengthen focus, and build a bigger, brighter brain.

It will save you a trip to the pharmacy… and it might even save your life.

Source:

medscape.com/viewarticle/904630


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