I can say with absolute certainty that candida is playing a very strong role in the onset of dementia/alzheimer's like symptoms in my mom. Since going strictly on an anti-candida diet it is day and night the difference. Basically she gets significantly more confused when shes not on the diet and it clears up the longer she's on the diet. She would have 2-day migraines from triggers in her diet (that feed the candida). We had this confirmed through lab testing showing exceptionally high levels of D-arabinitol. Needless to say I'm convinced candida or similar unbalanced microbiomes play a massive unrealized role in dementia/alzheimers, likely the primary role. Gut is the 2nd brain after all, neurons and all.
It's worth noting that practitioners of western medicine have been scoffing at naturopathic doctors for decades over their focus on the role of C. albicans in some chronic, systemic disorders that are difficult to diagnose and treat. The standard wisdom was (and largely still is) that everyone has candida and it is only medically relevant in severely immunocompromised individuals.
It is nice to see that researchers are starting to look more deeply into the fungal component of the microbiome and peripheral effects that fungi can have around the body beyond the classically studied and treated acute fungal infections. Although populations are less stable and are in smaller number than the bacteria and viruses, we carry an incredible load of these organisms in our bodies and they are constantly interacting with our microbiome and immune system:
"Dysbiosis (ie, an imbalance in the composition of the microbial community, which includes loss of symbionts, outgrowth of pathobionts or opportunists, and disturbed inter-microbial competition and microbial diversity) of the gut mycobiota has been implicated in a number of diseases, spanning autoimmune, metabolic, and neurological disorders, and cancers. Colonisation and growth of opportunistic fungal pathogens in the gut can induce dysregulated host immune responses thereby influencing the disease course. In addition, gut fungi—particularly Candida spp—sophistically influence the assembly and function of the gut bacterial microbiome (another cardinal regulator of host physiology), through cellular contact, competition or collaboration for available nutrients, production of secondary metabolites and antimicrobial peptides, and physiochemical changes to the gut niche."
> It's worth noting that practitioners of western medicine have been scoffing at naturopathic doctors for decades over their focus on the role of C. albicans in some chronic, systemic disorders that are difficult to diagnose and treat.
The problem is that if you are wrong a lot, people stop listening and will not hear you out when you are right.
It is also not very helpful to be right about things when there is no way of telling when you are right or wrong.
If I predict an earthquake in San Francisco "tomorrow" every single day, at some point, I will be correct.
The problem with "naturopathic" treatments is that people forget that there are 4 outcomes--not 2. There is treated-got better, didn't treat-didn't get better. Then there are also treated-didn't get better and didn't treat-got better anyway.
A treatment needs to show appropriate statistics in all 4 outcomes. "Treated-got better" loses a lot of its causative power when there are also a lot of "Treated-didn't get better", for example.
The denial over the role of gut microbiome in producing and modulating neurotransmitters seems like one of the biggest misses in modern science. People are in sheer and utter denial over the idea that some bacteria in the gut might actually affect what's going on in the brain, but now there are potential links to parkinsons and several other neurological disorders.
It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters). Maybe we are fat because of some additive or ingredient that has changed our microbiomes, or the relative availability of different types food/energy to that microbiome has changed the microbiome.
You are your microbiome, at a fine enough level you are just cells doing a fixed role, and the other fauna do theirs too. There is no magic "sentience cell" or magic spark, it's just the synergistic effect of all these systems powering the most advanced biological machine known to exist, each doing their own individual thing.
But people find this idea of biologicalism inherently troubling in many respects and tend to downplay it because it leads to uncomfortable conclusions about the nature of consciousness and sentience. Maybe people are actually just reacting to stimuli in accordance with their past training - so that nobel prize winning scientist could have ended up in jail for selling crack if they had been placed in different circumstances. Everyone knows this intellectually but I think it is going to become uncomfortable the degree to which our actions are biological and not conscious etc, and what that means about how we've handled the least of us for the past centuries.
This isn't to throw away the "nature vs nurture" debate entirely but it very clearly is passed through a biological lens on both sides - the nature and nurture are just training set and fine-tuning for a net, there's no inherent "ghost in the machine" but just a series of chemical reactions according to some trained weights and biological machinery. Change the machinery, and you change the person (Phineas Gage, lobotomies, psychiatric drugs, etc). And people really don't like that idea, that what they think of as "consciousness" might just be a low-dimensional projection of the unconscious processing, that the brain has developed as this adjunct facility for language and conceptual processing. Surely the consciousness must be the feature, not the projection, right?
People dug in their heels against this with antidepressants and other things, and the microbiome is an equally uncomfortable topic because of what it says about how our hardware works. It's not even just some chemicals floating around inside our brain that tell it how to work... it involves more or less every part of the body (or at least the metabolic pathway).
The supplement Candex can help clear candida from the gut and that helps reduce the load on the rest of the body. Candida overgrowth is part of many allergic conditions too. The biggest help I found was in skipping traditional wheat breads as much as possible and eating Spelt bread, while a wheat it doesn't harbor the same kind of yeasts. Good luck with your Mom.
Thanks for the suggestion for Candex, will look into getting some asap! I've been using one called GI-Microb-X for my mom and otherwise just staying on an anti-candida diet. We so far are just staying away from all breads and mainly eating vegetables + meat + fish + nuts, etc. Going to ease back into some things, like e.g. as you say spelt bread maybe not so bad, but we're still getting over the acute phase of this so being pretty strict to begin with. Thanks again for the recommendation.
An anti-candida diet is just a diet that is very low in sugar or things that digest into sugars (so minimizing anything that would feed populations of candida yeasts in the gut), while simultaneously consuming things (foods, supplements or drugs) that actively fight or kill off the yeast.
Interestingly, for my mom, the migraines are a sign of the "die-off" symptoms. So we have to be careful not to kill off the candida too aggressively or else it will cause headaches that are too much (so we do it gradually).
Practically, an anti-candida diet is like a keto diet but without the counting carbs and also avoiding dairy - so lots of non-starchy vegetables, meat, fish, avocados etc. basically
Have you tried using prescription-strength probiotics such as Visbiome to maybe help out-compete the candida? Also, have you tried just getting her on nystatin or some other antifungal? That might make the special diet unnecessary.
It's worth mentioning that ketogenic diets have also been used to treat dementia and alzheimers. With the proposed mechanism being a metabolic insufficiency in the brain caused by impaired glucose transport across the blood-brain barrier. Ketones are transported via a different mechanism, which appears to be unaffected.
There is a common trend of diets which simultaneously produce ketones, and starve bacteria/fungi being used to treat disease. It's difficult to know whether it's the microbial mechanism or the metabolic mechanism which is responsible for the effect.
Y'all probably know this, but exercise caution analyzing studies regarding new, tenuous relationships to health topics. Doubly so if the topic is winning current funding popularity contests. A particularly common mental trap is taking something that has a decent chance of being true (gut microflora affect health) and extrapolating that to something with much weaker evidence (this particular set of unstudied gut microflora peddled by somebody with financial motive to deceive me will improve my personal health situation), and applying a layman's understanding of novel research doesn't help.
The beta-amyloid connection to Alzheimer's has issues (outright fraud among them), and the opposing viewpoint (that fermented foods, especially those with live active cultures (though admittedly not studying this variant specifically AFAIK), help resist AD or decrease symptoms after onset) has decent supporting literature as well.
> The beta-amyloid connection to Alzheimer's has issues (outright fraud among them), and the opposing viewpoint (that fermented foods, especially those with live active cultures (though admittedly not studying this variant specifically AFAIK), help resist AD or decrease symptoms after onset) has decent supporting literature as well.
This is interesting to me. Do you have a link to a good overview of the fermented foods argument?
FWIW, I am someone whose body and brain operate several orders of magnitude better and more consistently when I am on something that looks like a paleo diet (which doesn't sound that different than the anti-candida diet).
I was never close to being "bad enough" to go see a doctor for fatigue or anything like that, but it's the difference between "OK" and "great." One of the things I noticed is that when I am doing this diet, my skin clears up while when I am off it, I get slight rashes. Again not bad enough to see a doctor but indication that a diet rich in sugars/carbs allows enough yeast to propagate that it shows up in superficial rashes (so imagine what's going on inside the body.)
I have no idea the connection between it and Alzheimers, but there's probably a crisp connection between "clean diet" and "good health" and then between "good health" and "ability to fend off disease like Alzheimers"
There's always going to be people who will say "oh this is not definitively proven so I am not going to get excited about it" and that's fine but it also feels like missing a lot of opportunity to leverage a bunch of empirical observation to your advantage, and feel better (and look better!) in the process.
I don't think one should self-diagnose. From the sound of things, you don't have a diagnosis of anything specific?
There are diseases out there that can cause rashes, but you might not realize you actually have the condition. Since you mention diet, Crohn's and celiac disease can both cause rashes that come and go, for example, and correlate with disease activity.
I would not jump to yeast as the first obvious explanation.
I fully agree with your point actually -- if something can be known, one should try to find out. To your point, I actually had myself tested for Celiac once I saw how well Paleo worked for me. But I don't have it...
While your point stands, I think my point does too - even in spaces where you don't get a crisp diagnosis or a scientifically proven link, the empirical observations are valuable and actionable.
- Having the APOE e4 allele (which can be mitigated through diet).
Then, more recent discoveries point to the roles of:
- Sleep: detoxifies our brain.
- Exercise: detoxifies the brain and stimulates neuronal growth.
- Cribiform plate ossification through aging: somehow prevents detoxification of substances in the brain.
- Bacteria that causes gingivitis: found to get to the brain, promote inflammation, and its increased presence is found among biopsied brains for thoss who had Alzheimer's.
- Candida albicans, as this paper describes.
Supplements being studied to somehow benefit Alzheimer's:
- Curcumin: supplements like Longvida potentially help, but at doses much higher than those listed on supplement bottles. Other forms are also being investigated.
- Magnesium threonate: gets more magnesium into the brain. Some MDs testify of what they did for their Alzheimer's patients. Still being studied.
Things that probably don't help:
- Donepezil: still being given to patients, but data now suggests it's not very useful.
That's all I can recall from memory. Very interesting disease.
> Here, the researchers show that the Ab-like peptides also can be generated from a different source – C. albicans. This common fungus, which has been detected in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic neurodegenerative disorders, has its own set of proteases that can generate the same Ab-like peptides the brain can generate endogenously.
I love hearing the "what", but would also appreciate some speculation on the "why". Does this fungus somehow thrive better because of some underlying issue? Is some natural process that usually would clean up these Ab-like peptides being suppressed?
Everywhere, all the time. It is ubiquitous and one of the normal human symbiotes. You probably have some on your skin and in your mouth right now. It can cause candidiasis - thrush - usually of the mouth or genitals. This is rare except in the badly immunocompromised.
I think they are in everyone’s bodies as part of the flora so if you have too much of it like when there is an imbalance under maybe if you have weakened immune that could be a problem. Treat it as a probability like how often you can get hurt driving a car, and don’t worry about it
C. albicans represents a large fraction of infections contracted in hospitals (IIRC second only to various staph infections). You come into contact with it all the time, without too much risk -- until your immune system is weakened, or it gets into somewhere that your immune system doesn't really contest that strongly.
Readit News
It is nice to see that researchers are starting to look more deeply into the fungal component of the microbiome and peripheral effects that fungi can have around the body beyond the classically studied and treated acute fungal infections. Although populations are less stable and are in smaller number than the bacteria and viruses, we carry an incredible load of these organisms in our bodies and they are constantly interacting with our microbiome and immune system:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
"Dysbiosis (ie, an imbalance in the composition of the microbial community, which includes loss of symbionts, outgrowth of pathobionts or opportunists, and disturbed inter-microbial competition and microbial diversity) of the gut mycobiota has been implicated in a number of diseases, spanning autoimmune, metabolic, and neurological disorders, and cancers. Colonisation and growth of opportunistic fungal pathogens in the gut can induce dysregulated host immune responses thereby influencing the disease course. In addition, gut fungi—particularly Candida spp—sophistically influence the assembly and function of the gut bacterial microbiome (another cardinal regulator of host physiology), through cellular contact, competition or collaboration for available nutrients, production of secondary metabolites and antimicrobial peptides, and physiochemical changes to the gut niche."
The problem is that if you are wrong a lot, people stop listening and will not hear you out when you are right.
It is also not very helpful to be right about things when there is no way of telling when you are right or wrong.
The problem with "naturopathic" treatments is that people forget that there are 4 outcomes--not 2. There is treated-got better, didn't treat-didn't get better. Then there are also treated-didn't get better and didn't treat-got better anyway.
A treatment needs to show appropriate statistics in all 4 outcomes. "Treated-got better" loses a lot of its causative power when there are also a lot of "Treated-didn't get better", for example.
It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters). Maybe we are fat because of some additive or ingredient that has changed our microbiomes, or the relative availability of different types food/energy to that microbiome has changed the microbiome.
You are your microbiome, at a fine enough level you are just cells doing a fixed role, and the other fauna do theirs too. There is no magic "sentience cell" or magic spark, it's just the synergistic effect of all these systems powering the most advanced biological machine known to exist, each doing their own individual thing.
But people find this idea of biologicalism inherently troubling in many respects and tend to downplay it because it leads to uncomfortable conclusions about the nature of consciousness and sentience. Maybe people are actually just reacting to stimuli in accordance with their past training - so that nobel prize winning scientist could have ended up in jail for selling crack if they had been placed in different circumstances. Everyone knows this intellectually but I think it is going to become uncomfortable the degree to which our actions are biological and not conscious etc, and what that means about how we've handled the least of us for the past centuries.
This isn't to throw away the "nature vs nurture" debate entirely but it very clearly is passed through a biological lens on both sides - the nature and nurture are just training set and fine-tuning for a net, there's no inherent "ghost in the machine" but just a series of chemical reactions according to some trained weights and biological machinery. Change the machinery, and you change the person (Phineas Gage, lobotomies, psychiatric drugs, etc). And people really don't like that idea, that what they think of as "consciousness" might just be a low-dimensional projection of the unconscious processing, that the brain has developed as this adjunct facility for language and conceptual processing. Surely the consciousness must be the feature, not the projection, right?
People dug in their heels against this with antidepressants and other things, and the microbiome is an equally uncomfortable topic because of what it says about how our hardware works. It's not even just some chemicals floating around inside our brain that tell it how to work... it involves more or less every part of the body (or at least the metabolic pathway).
Interestingly, for my mom, the migraines are a sign of the "die-off" symptoms. So we have to be careful not to kill off the candida too aggressively or else it will cause headaches that are too much (so we do it gradually).
Practically, an anti-candida diet is like a keto diet but without the counting carbs and also avoiding dairy - so lots of non-starchy vegetables, meat, fish, avocados etc. basically
There is a common trend of diets which simultaneously produce ketones, and starve bacteria/fungi being used to treat disease. It's difficult to know whether it's the microbial mechanism or the metabolic mechanism which is responsible for the effect.
Deleted Comment
The beta-amyloid connection to Alzheimer's has issues (outright fraud among them), and the opposing viewpoint (that fermented foods, especially those with live active cultures (though admittedly not studying this variant specifically AFAIK), help resist AD or decrease symptoms after onset) has decent supporting literature as well.
This is interesting to me. Do you have a link to a good overview of the fermented foods argument?
Which entities would have financial motives to have people eat less sugar and flour? Specially consider how big the industries behind those two are.
This is a tangent but Herbal supplements are a billion dollar industry.
I was never close to being "bad enough" to go see a doctor for fatigue or anything like that, but it's the difference between "OK" and "great." One of the things I noticed is that when I am doing this diet, my skin clears up while when I am off it, I get slight rashes. Again not bad enough to see a doctor but indication that a diet rich in sugars/carbs allows enough yeast to propagate that it shows up in superficial rashes (so imagine what's going on inside the body.)
I have no idea the connection between it and Alzheimers, but there's probably a crisp connection between "clean diet" and "good health" and then between "good health" and "ability to fend off disease like Alzheimers"
There's always going to be people who will say "oh this is not definitively proven so I am not going to get excited about it" and that's fine but it also feels like missing a lot of opportunity to leverage a bunch of empirical observation to your advantage, and feel better (and look better!) in the process.
There are diseases out there that can cause rashes, but you might not realize you actually have the condition. Since you mention diet, Crohn's and celiac disease can both cause rashes that come and go, for example, and correlate with disease activity.
I would not jump to yeast as the first obvious explanation.
While your point stands, I think my point does too - even in spaces where you don't get a crisp diagnosis or a scientifically proven link, the empirical observations are valuable and actionable.
- Traumatic head injury
- Potentially increases risk: getting more viral infections (getting the common cold very often).
- Depression
- Cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease
- Born to older parents
- Smoking.
- Family history of dementia
- Increased homocysteine levels (B vitamins, hypothyroidism, smoking, excess alcohol, aging)
- Having the APOE e4 allele (which can be mitigated through diet).
Then, more recent discoveries point to the roles of:
- Sleep: detoxifies our brain.
- Exercise: detoxifies the brain and stimulates neuronal growth.
- Cribiform plate ossification through aging: somehow prevents detoxification of substances in the brain.
- Bacteria that causes gingivitis: found to get to the brain, promote inflammation, and its increased presence is found among biopsied brains for thoss who had Alzheimer's.
- Candida albicans, as this paper describes.
Supplements being studied to somehow benefit Alzheimer's:
- Curcumin: supplements like Longvida potentially help, but at doses much higher than those listed on supplement bottles. Other forms are also being investigated.
- Magnesium threonate: gets more magnesium into the brain. Some MDs testify of what they did for their Alzheimer's patients. Still being studied.
Things that probably don't help:
- Donepezil: still being given to patients, but data now suggests it's not very useful.
That's all I can recall from memory. Very interesting disease.
- VZV & HSV1 Alzheimer's; and so Gardasil9+ for all?
Deleted Comment
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(23)01252-4....
I love hearing the "what", but would also appreciate some speculation on the "why". Does this fungus somehow thrive better because of some underlying issue? Is some natural process that usually would clean up these Ab-like peptides being suppressed?
Common enough they let you buy the antimicrobial treatments off the shelf.
Candida albicans is just a type of yeast that grows in the human gut and is one of the common causes of thrush (i.e. a yeast infection).
So it's uh pretty much everywhere.