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Practical Approaches Needed to How We Investigate and Treat Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia
By Gloria Simpson, Chief Nursing Ops – Young Blood Institute
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article offering tips on how middle-aged people can avoid dementia later in life. The article explained that dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and cognitive decline are conditions resulting from brain changes that start to occur in midlife, but by eating a healthy diet, engaging in regular exercise, and staying socially and mentally active, people can experience better outcomes later in life.
Good lifestyle and preventative health practices improve outcomes for all diseases, not just Alzheimer’s, and this article offers nothing specific for avoiding Alzheimer’s and related conditions. “More scientists are looking for clues in the midlife brain because efforts to target dementia in older people have largely failed,” the article reports.
Scientists have been searching for clues that might lead to a cure for Alzheimer’s for decades. As a nurse who has treated Alzheimer’s patients, as well as the daughter and niece of Alzheimer’s victims, I have a personal interest in this horrible disease. I’ve been to a few Alzheimer’s conferences, and it seems a fact that endless research has failed to this point — despite the investment of tens of billions of dollars over many decades.
Could it be that the conclusion of nearly every research study ends with “more research needed,” creating a self-perpetuating research industry? And every new drug seems to focus on narrow therapeutic targets and minute statistical manipulation to gain FDA approval to go to market, which invariably ends in one failed drug after another. Yet, practical alternatives have been ignored.
For example, I personally led a small team of apheresis nurses in Florida to study Therapeutic Plasma Exchange (TPE) in 200 moderate-stage Alzheimer’s subjects over 4 years, from 2014–2018. Grifols (NASDAQ: GRFS) of Spain sponsored that study, called AMBAR for Alzheimer’s Management By Albumin Replacement, and they studied an additional 300 subjects in Barcelona, Spain during the same period. Plasma exchange has been around for decades, since the 70’s, and I have personally conducted over 10,000 procedures in my 30 year career. It’s not a sexy new drug, but a relatively well-established therapy. So it may not capture the interest of researchers interested in new career-defining discoveries.
Yet the AMBAR study reported a 61% success rate in stopping the progression of the disease, and I personally witnessed patients (in the “good” control arm) actually recover their memories. I saw an orchard farmer who couldn’t tell a lemon from a lime regain his cognitive function and begin to teach me about different fruit species and how to fertilize and grow crops. I saw a non-communicative former Spanish dancer regain her memory and motivation and begin dancing again. She got her groove back and even started flirting with the doctors. I saw another man who replied “Ask my wife” to every question start telling me stories about his kids, grandkids, and nephews — by name. How many researchers have ever seen patients actually recover their memories?
Now in Spain, they’ve actually commercialized plasma exchange for Alzheimer’s patients at the Ace Alzheimer’s Center in Barcelona. I met the founder of the Ace Alzheimer Center and the principal investigator for the AMBAR study, Merce Boada, on a FaceTime call recently. She’s one of the only people I’ve met, other than my nursing colleagues from the AMBAR study, who has seen Alzheimer’s patients actually recover their memory.
I’ve been working with the Young Blood Institute since 2018, shortly after completing the AMBAR study, and we’ve discovered in our pre-clinical studies that Therapeutic Plasma Exchange appears to lower or clear Aβ levels in cognitively normal subjects based on blood tests from Shimadzu Amyloid testing service. This means we might be able to use plasma exchange to prevent Alzheimer’s disease by nipping Aβ in the bud before it has a chance to develop and entomb the brain with the fibrils that destroy neurons and brain cells, and, ultimately, memory.
Is plasma exchange a cure for Alzheimer’s disease? Probably not, but it can work as a regular therapy. It’s not a cure for other neurological and autoimmune disorders either, and TPE typically requires ongoing periodic treatments. And it’s safe and effective. Some patients receive TPE for their entire lives, with varying frequencies from a few times every few years to regularly every 90 days, depending on the severity of their condition. And it keeps the patients healthy and, in some cases, has other beneficial effects, like improvements in skin condition.
In other words, Plasma Exchange can be a practical alternative for Alzheimer’s victims until the researchers finally discover a cure someday in the future.
– Gloria Simpson, Chief Nursing Ops for The Young Blood Institute, boasts over 25 years of nursing experience, specializing in apheresis procedures. Notably, she managed the Grifols AMBARI study, witnessing Alzheimer’s patients undergoing plasma exchange treatments recover their memories — an exceptional occurrence rarely observed. She brought this firsthand insight to the Young Blood Institute in 2018, contributing to the development of optimized SOPs and TPE protocols. Now with AmβARI Healthcare, Gloria continues to pioneer the commercialization of these groundbreaking results, training a team in YBI SOPs and protocols.
