The Enhance Protocol - Hope for Brain Health
The Enhance Protocol – Hope for Brain Health
In 1906, a German physician named Alois Alzheimer performed an autopsy and discovered tangles and plaques in the brain of one of his patients, a 55-year-old woman named Auguste Deter, who had died after several years of aggressive and progressive cognitive decline. The disease now named for Dr. Alzheimer has become the 6th leading cause of death in the United States. One in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia and cases Alzheimer’s disease are projected to nearly triple by 2050. Clearly, Alzheimer’s disease is a public health crisis and much needs to be done to save the brains of people all over the world from this terrible disease.
Unfortunately, efforts to develop medication to effectively cure or treat Alzheimer’s have failed. Over 400 drug trials have produced a handful of medications, none of which makes a major change in the trajectory of the disease for the majority who take them, and the side effects of the medications make them difficult for some people to tolerate. At A Mind For All Seasons, we believe efforts to produce a medication have largely failed because they are based on two fundamentally flawed assumptions: 1. With enough funding, time and research, a drug will be found that cures Alzheimer’s. 2. Amyloid beta protein is both the cause and the symptom of Alzheimer’s.
A different approach is to ask why the body produces excess amyloid beta protein in the first place. Dr. Dale Bredesen, an MD neurologist at UCLA’s Buck Institute who has published hundreds of papers on Alzheimer’s in the last thirty years, began asking that question and identified many factors that can turn up the production of amyloid and cause the brain to downsize. These factors, or ‘dementogens’ as Dr. Bredesen calls them, involve nutrient deficiencies, toxic substances like heavy metals, herbicides, pesticides, and mold, hormone deficiencies, chronic inflammation, and insulin resistance. He theorized that trying to fix a brain with Alzheimer’s is like attempting to patch a roof with multiple holes: you may patch one hole, but the roof will still leak unless you identify all the holes and patch each one. He took the approach of doing a broad panel of labs to identify factors contributing to cognitive decline, then developing a personalized program for each patient to address these factors.
The results of Dr. Bredesen’s multi-modal approach are impressive, including a patient whose hippocampal volume (basically the memory control tower in the brain) increased from the 17th to the 75th percentile after 10 months of treatment. Functionally, those treated in a programmatic way regained a lot of ability to manage their activities of daily living.
Randy Vawdrey, Chief Medical Officer of A Mind For All Seasons®, attended training with Dr. Bredesen in 2017 and has very successfully employed his techniques with hundreds of patients. Randy and Eric Collett, CEO of A Mind For All Seasons, developed The Enhance Protocol, an approach that combines Dr. Bredesen’s groundbreaking ReCODE Protocol with tools, systems, medical devices, training for loved ones, and a coaching program to make it easier for people anywhere in the country to take steps to improve their cognitive functioning.
Eric and Randy also developed what may be the world’s first program to transform assisted living and skilled nursing facilities from places where seniors with cognitive decline receive safety and supervision to communities with brain health centers where both those who reside in the community and others from the broader area can go to participate in The Enhance Protocol. Though it seems counter to traditional thinking, the goal of these communities is to help people reduce their care needs over time or avoid moving into the community in the first place.
For example, a device A Mind For All Seasons uses in our Brain Gym (aka the Brain Therapy Studio) is one for audio-visual entrainment. This technique, which has been around for decades and has a lot of good science backing it, uses pulses of light, sound and mild electrical current to stimulate brainwaves to shift in desirable ways. Robeson, a memory coach at The Summit at Sunland Springs in Mesa, AZ, has described audio-visual entrainment as practically ‘magical’ because it has helped so many of the residents he serves calm down and avoid the use of antipsychotic medications.
As you can see, there is MUCH that can be done to help people living with dementia have a chance to function better. Through The Enhance Protocol, A Mind For All Seasons is offering clients all over the country real hope and practical strategies. Contact A Mind For All Seasons today to find out how you can take advantage of the new hope for brain health offered by The Enhance Protocol, right in your own home or at a community near you!
