Jeffrey Bland, PhD, in a May 21, 2018 YouTube monologue, frames Alzheimer’s disease as a growing public-health crisis and argues that single-drug ‘silver bullet’ solutions are unlikely. He highlights multimodal clinical strategies advocated by Dr. Dale Bredesen and Dr. David Perlmutter—evaluating 30+ biological indices per person—as better aligned with emerging molecular-psychiatry evidence (Science, Feb 9, 2018) that psychiatric and neurodegenerative conditions reflect polygenic, network-level dysfunction rather than single-gene causes.
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Neurodegenerative disorders. As you know, we have seen an unbelievable uptick in the interest that people have in conditions like Alzheimer's disease, which is the pandemic of our age, and have wondered what can we do about that, knowing that there is no drug that has been approved for use that really treats successfully Alzheimer's disease. And then we have on the other side this incredible work that Dr. Dale Brendesen and Dr. David Perlmutter are involved with looking at functional intake and inputs as it relates to the both prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease using a multimodal way of addressing the problem. There is still a tremendous amount of research going on in neurosciences that is looking for what might be considered the silver bullet. Is it that we will find a drug that will block or modify one specific function in neurochemistry that's going to eliminate or alleviate the progression of Alzheimer's disease? Is there such a thing that would even be possible? And now what we're learning is maybe not that, maybe the Dr. Dale Bredesen approach that is using this multimodal 30 plus different indices to try to evaluate individual nature of etiology of Alzheimer's is really where the gold is laid and that's where the veins that we ought to be prospecting are residing. Why do I say that? Because I look in the most recent issue of Science magazine, this was in actually in the February 9th issue of 2018, page 619. And they talk about psychiatrists are beginning to map genetic architecture of mental disorders and looking for what are the specific genes or gene that is related to a specific diagnosis of a mental disease, some type of a psychiatric disease. And what they're finding, the more and more they look and they do the gene mapping and look at gwas associations with mental disorders and and psychiatric diseases, is that there's no simple gene map against a single diagnosis. In fact, what they're finding is the gene expression patterns from hundreds of human brains are now really starting to recognize that these are complex arrays of different functional patterns, certain networks. And in fact, in this article that appeared in the same issue of Science magazine, they talk about shared molecular neuropathology across major psychiatric disorders that parallels polygenic overlap, that these are multiple genes are expressed in multiple ways in individuals that give rise to the function that we call the etiology or the prodromal of that psychiatric or neuropsychiatric disorder. So I think that what we're starting to see at the basis of neurosciences and the basis of psychiatry, molecular psychiatry, is the origin of a new model. And the model is that which maps much more closely to the approach that Dr. Dale Bredesen is taking to to look at multiple factors in an individual's expression of their physiology that impinge or relate to neurological function. I think that this concept that Alzheimer's is not a disease, but is a complex collection of differing uniquenesses that are affected by hormones, affected by insulin signaling, and affected by oxidants, affected by inflammatory mediators, affected by certain nutrients that are either present or absent in adequate levels. These are all the new frontier of where, I think, as difficult as that research is to do, where the answers where the veins of gold are to be found. So I think that neuroscience is telling us something, molecular psychiatry is telling us something, and it seems to match up very closely with what we are learning from Dr. Dale Brendesen and Dr. David Perlmutter's work.
