Might We Have A Possible Cause For Alzheimer’s?

hey there David H Lawrence the 17th this
is gonna be a tough video for me I’m not
sure if you’ve ever encountered or have
been made aware of one of the most
insidious diseases that we have in our
society if it’s touched your family your
friends it hadn’t touched mine until I
had a very innocent phone call maybe six
seven years ago with a dear friend
fellow colleague and radio is my news
guy at the big 12:20 WGA are in
Cleveland and he also worked in
television for the longest time he was a
reporter for Channel three he pulled the
lottery numbers for the Ohio lottery
every week and he just had a great sense
of humor a really funny very creative
guy he and his family just the salt of
the earth and after he’d been finished
with radio television he formed a video
company you know shooting videos doing
documentaries things like that won some
Emmys for them and Betsy had the need
for some video production some on-site
shooting and I thought oh Bob would be
great for this so I called him in
Cleveland and our phone calls were
normally salted with a lot of really
dark humor but this phone call was
different his speech was slow and
halting and tentative
and I couldn’t tell whether he was
joking or he was seriously suffering I I
just couldn’t tell
and I finally said to him listen this
isn’t funny are you suffering from
something medical and there was a pause
and he said yes here and he gave the
phone to his wife who let me know that
Bob had been diagnosed with early onset
Alzheimer’s in his early fifties
Alzheimer’s
I immediately burst into tears I didn’t
know what to do I learned over the next
few years what to do when someone is in
that situation and I watched he and his
family become involved in the
Alzheimer’s community trying to find
treatments and cures and it’s it’s a
tough slog they have tried pretty much
everything they’ve looked at genetics
they’ve looked at diet they’ve looked at
medicines they’ve looked at environment
they’ve looked at you know an incredible
number of things the drugs that they’ve
created to try and treat Alzheimer’s
have had a ninety-nine percent failure
rate and the only reason it isn’t a
hundred percent is that there are still
some drugs that are not out of testing
yet so there’s no ruling on those yet
it’s just it’s just crazy and after I
found out about his condition
I also narrated a book called League of
denial which was about the NFL
concussion crisis and the the problems
of football players and other players
and contact sports have been having with
concussions and dementia and you know I
learned about CTE which is chronic
traumatic encephalopathy and learned how
to pronounce it as though I knew the
that phrase my whole life learned about
amyloid proteins and tau and how the
spots on the brain mean something
all it did was heighten the frustration
of not being able to treat or cure this
disease they’re kind of like connected
to each other and then this past January
I saw that there was an article in the
journal Science advances and there was a
study that shows great promise in
getting to the root of what’s causing
this they think and they’ve had some
some other studies that have
corroborated what they found in this one
study it turns out that this study
concluded that Alzheimer’s may be caused
by something as simple
a microbe and the microbe is called poly
sorry poor pheromone Asst gingivalis
pour fire Ramona’s gingivalis and if
gingivalis sounds familiar maybe you’re
thinking of gingivitis which is what
causes gum disease it is a gum disease
and poor pheromone is gingivalis is the
main bacterium involved in gingivitis
and in gum disease and it had already
been identified as a risk factor for
Alzheimer’s so there’d been a
correlation but not a cause-and-effect
connection but now they’re saying that
the blood-brain barrier which is kind of
like this membrane barrier between one
part of your body systems with a lot of
waste products in it and what needs to
be a very very carefully controlled
clean environment for the blood that
goes to your brain can be breached by
this bacterium and they think it
generates these amyloid proteins and tau
and manifests itself as Alzheimer’s now
this is not a cure they also note that
it’s not just the micro but it’s a
combination of the microbe and
potentially genetics being susceptible
to this
but man it’s like how does this happen
how does that microbe get past the
blood-brain barrier well it’s in the
mouth and the mouth and the nose is
physically close to the brain but it’s
also connected in different ways than
say the rest of your circulatory system
or the other organs in your body and of
course I’m no doctor but I’m looking at
this and I’m going wow this is a
potential bombshell this is potentially
great news for people like Bob and
others who suffer from this again it’s
not a cure and I just felt I had to
share it because it’s like a bright
moment in what has been a really dark a
series of events you know I go and see
him every so often and I can see that he
remembers me because he brightens up he
he changes and he giggles and I miss
the guy I knew and I love both the guy I
knew and the guy he is today and I’m
hoping that this means that there might
be a future that’s different than what
he’s facing right
so I don’t know if there’s anybody in
your family that suffers from
Alzheimer’s or from other forms of
dementia but you might want to check it
out again it’s the journal Science
advances that’s the name of the journal
Science advances I sure hope that this
leads to something I really do I got I
got nothing here that’s gonna increase
your productivity or show you how to do
voiceover better I just wanted to share
with you a story of hope
and I’d love to hear your stories of
hope I’d love to hear what connection
you may have with this if any at all
leave me a comment below this if you’re
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Lawrence xvii I thank you so much for
watching and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.