Could Alzheimer's disease be cured?

I am reading a marvellous book of Dale Bredesen titled The End of Alzheimer’s – thanks for my friend Pertti for an excellent Christmas gift.

Alzheimer’s disease (just AD in the sequel) has been regarded as a disease without any effective treatment. A lot of progress has however occurred during last years in the understanding of AD and related diseases causing neuro-degeneration. Bredesen’s group has developed a programme to stop and even reverse the development of cognitive decline and dementia.

The first chapter of the book contains a long list about the symptoms of AD. One must be cautious while reading this list. A strongly introvert and unpractical person like me having suffered from strong social fears during childhood, youth and mid age might conclude having been AD patient for all his life. Our personality however means that we have our strengths and weaknesses. Only if we begin to lose our strengths, there is a good reason to get worried.

AD involves brain inflammation causing a generation of amyloid, a plaque that destroys synaptic connections crucial for various learned skills. This leads to the symptoms of AD. Amyloids were for long time thought to be the cause of AD but it turned out to be only a manner how brain defends itself: in AD this defence has only developed to over reaction: somewhat like too strong immune response causing allergy.

In an attempt to to cure AD one can do three things (in collaboration with a professional since AD has strongly patient dependent profile).

1. Get rid brain inflammation.

2. Eliminate the sources of inflammation: both infection by microbes and sugar containing proteins.
3. Provide brain with the needed nutrients including metabolic energy, hormones, and trophic factors helping the regeneration of synapses.

This program requires nothing less than changing of the life style.

The motivation for this post emerged as I started to read a chapter about how the new view about AD developed through the study of AD in Petri dishes, a completely new lab level approach initiated by Bredesen’s group. Two big surprises were in store.

1. It was found that in AD the neurons perform a suicide instead of fighting against the disease! They just give up! This was something totally unexpected.

2. The researchers had an idea that there are receptors in brain stem, which could relate to neuro-degeneration. The idea was that when the receptors bind to corresponding ligands, the neuron dies. It would be kind of organized suicide. But this did not occur! Neurons die if the ligand is not present! A healthy cell must have both ligands and receptors.

While reading, I realized that this fits nicely with the TGD based vision that magnetic body (MB) of the brain takes care of the brain by receiving information as signals from brain and sending back control commands. Before continuing it is good to briefly summarize some key aspects of TGD view about biology and brain. There are several new notions.

1. The notion of MB distinguishes between TGD and Maxwellian (gauge theory) view about fields. In many-sheeted space-time one can say that physical object has field identity, field body. Given for instance a magnetic flux tube realized as topological field quantum -tubular 3-surface – one can tell, which physical system it emanates from. The double formed by organism and its environment is replaced with a triple formed by MB , the organism, and environment, and this changes profoundly the view about possible disorders of organism.

2. Hierarchy of Planck constants h_eff/h=n making possible macroscopic quantum coherence in various scales is a key element of TGD inspired quantum biology. This hierarchy emerges as a prediction of adelic physics suggested to provide a unification of ordinary physics and of physics of cognition by introducing besides real number based physics also various p-adic physics serving as a correlate of cognition. h_eff/h=n hierarchy and p-adic length scale hypothesis define fractal hierarchies of length and time scales: this fractality means that the standard length scale reductionism breaks down and that interesting new effects emerge in all scales. I have been identifying these effects for more than two decades now: the information flux from web has been indispensable in this task. Living matter would be one of the most striking deviations from the naive reductionism. Even molecular physics and chemistry fail to reduce to atomic physics as the reductionistic dogma dictates.

MB carries dark cyclotron condensates and dark photons with with non-standard value of h_eff/h=n. Cyclotron condensates and cyclotron radiation are crucial for the control of organism by its MB. The feed of metabolic energy generates cyclotron condensates.

If the ligands are absent, the communication line does not exist and MB does not receive information from brain: MB cannot see its protege. Also the control of MB can fail if it involves this kind of bridges: MB becomes lame unable to help its protege.

Could the blindness of MB be the cause of A?! Could AD -and presumably many other diseases – be disorders in communications between brain (and body) and MB due to the broken communication lines?

Nerve pulse patterns would give rise to this kind of structure with neurotransmitters giving rise to small bridges between pre- and post-synaptic neurons. The formation of amyloid plaques would destroy the synaptic connections and destroy the MBs is the scale of brain.

Remark: Watch-up network would serve as an analogy here.

Cyclotron radiation by biologically important ions would be needed to generate the dark photons needed in communications to and control from MB. EEG would be basic example of this kind of communications, which are however expected to be present in several frequency scales. Control commands could come via genome along flux sheets traversing DNA strand.

Generalized Josephson radiation from neuronal membranes could mediate “sensory” information from brain to MB. The frequencies of generalized Josephson radiation are sums of differences of cyclotron frequencies at the two sides of the neuronal membrane and genuine Josephson contribution ZeV/h_eff coding for the nerve pulse patterns representing information as frequency modulation.

At least the lack of Li and Mg are known to induce depression and suicide rates correlate with Li depletion.

Also control can fail. It is also possible that cyclotron condensates at MB are not generated so that MB cannot generate the dark cyclotron radiation driving the oscillators at biological body representing the control commands. This could be due to the lack of metabolic energy feed.

Alzheimer’s disease also inspires questions about memory. Neuroscientists often identify memories as skills. There are however memories such as sensory memories, which can be induced in any-one by electrical stimulation of temporal lobes. Also dreams involve these memories. One can have spontaneous memory of some smell or suffer pain in non-existing leg. Some people often regarded as cognitively impaired might have sensory memories regularly: this could explain their amazing memory feats. Some people hear music all the time in their head: Tchaikovsky is one example of this.

I find it difficult to believe that sensory memories would reduce to strengthening of synaptic connections in the brain now: they are not learned skills. In TGD picture the new view about time leads to the idea that the perceptive field is 4-D causal diamond (CD, 2-D visualization helps to understand) and that sensory memories are mental images (sub-CDs) located near either boundary of CD. The remaining mental images inside CD would be represented symbolically so that it would make sense to speak about “sensory now” in 3-D sense. Cognitive impairment would mean a loss of the symbolic representations and sensory representations might replace it and make memory feats possible.

Could this view be tested? Could Alzheimer patients have long term memories about time when brain was still healthy? Could they have sensory memories about that time? This might be the case: my grandmother lost her cognitive skills during her last years but re-lived her youth very intensely: she had even strong intention of going to dance!

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

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