Common fungus candida albicans might fuel Alzheimer's onset
neurosciencenews.com
neurosciencenews.com
I was pretty much skepticism incarnated and just what-the-hell-let's-prove-em-wrong-ed it. Whatever it was, either actually candida albicans infestation, or general bad eating habits, or whatever thing that this accidentally changed, or just the compound placebo of the diet discipline... the change was there.
Interestingly, for my mom, the migraines are a sign of the "die-off" symptoms. So we have to be careful not to kill off the candida too aggressively or else it will cause headaches that are too much (so we do it gradually).
Practically, an anti-candida diet is like a keto diet but without the counting carbs and also avoiding dairy - so lots of non-starchy vegetables, meat, fish, avocados etc. basically
It could also be a reaction to the drugs and low sugar.
If you live in a state or country where 'naturopath' is not a legally protected term, then yeah, proceed with abundant caution. You may well be seeing a high school dropout who has an unhealthy fascination with crystals, lol.
States with certifying body and licensing requirements have legal protections on using terms such as naturopath, ND, etc.
But not actual doctors right?
"A person represents himself or herself as a naturopath when that person adopts or uses any title or any description of services that incorporates one or more of the following terms or designations: Naturopath, naturopathy, naturopathic, naturopathic physician, ND, or doctor of naturopathic medicine."
Medicine advances one death at a time - and it's not the deaths of patients, but rather from the death of the old guard.
Again, not trying to debunk you. I'm just curious.
Observations of her diet and symptoms. 2 main qualities being observed here. 1 is migraine/headaches, the other is confusion. Both seem to have a 1-2 day delay, e.g. eating a very triggering food then in usually 1 1/2 days she will have migraine/headache, likewise increased confusion. So the trigger foods originally had been observed to be dairy mainly, but we had come to realize many foods were also triggering it in a lower-grade dairy was just very noticeable. So for your hypothesis of it being exogenous carbohydrates, which is a fair hypothesis, for me the fact that dairy is such a trigger makes me think it's not the carbs so much as the whatever is feeding the candida. So basically one of the reasons I believe it's the candida is because observationally, the foods in her diet that caused migraine/headache/confusion lined up with the foods that fed candida. Then going on anti-candida diet we don't have any of those symptoms. Yes it could still be something else. Anti-candida diet is as you say, low-carbs and low sugar which is good for many things. The dairy part though, in particular, leads me to believe it's more than carbs.
Then there's the lab testing that shows in particular indications of a severe yeast infection in the gut, e.g. candida.
So taken together, I'm led to believe candida is the main thing affecting her, though I'm very open to it being something related and not candida as such, but still all evidence so far points to candida.
It is nice to see that researchers are starting to look more deeply into the fungal component of the microbiome and peripheral effects that fungi can have around the body beyond the classically studied and treated acute fungal infections. Although populations are less stable and are in smaller number than the bacteria and viruses, we carry an incredible load of these organisms in our bodies and they are constantly interacting with our microbiome and immune system:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
"Dysbiosis (ie, an imbalance in the composition of the microbial community, which includes loss of symbionts, outgrowth of pathobionts or opportunists, and disturbed inter-microbial competition and microbial diversity) of the gut mycobiota has been implicated in a number of diseases, spanning autoimmune, metabolic, and neurological disorders, and cancers. Colonisation and growth of opportunistic fungal pathogens in the gut can induce dysregulated host immune responses thereby influencing the disease course. In addition, gut fungi—particularly Candida spp—sophistically influence the assembly and function of the gut bacterial microbiome (another cardinal regulator of host physiology), through cellular contact, competition or collaboration for available nutrients, production of secondary metabolites and antimicrobial peptides, and physiochemical changes to the gut niche."
It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters). Maybe we are fat because of some additive or ingredient that has changed our microbiomes, or the relative availability of different types food/energy to that microbiome has changed the microbiome.
You are your microbiome, at a fine enough level you are just cells doing a fixed role, and the other fauna do theirs too. There is no magic "sentience cell" or magic spark, it's just the synergistic effect of all these systems powering the most advanced biological machine known to exist, each doing their own individual thing.
But people find this idea of biologicalism inherently troubling in many respects and tend to downplay it because it leads to uncomfortable conclusions about the nature of consciousness and sentience. Maybe people are actually just reacting to stimuli in accordance with their past training - so that nobel prize winning scientist could have ended up in jail for selling crack if they had been placed in different circumstances. Everyone knows this intellectually but I think it is going to become uncomfortable the degree to which our actions are biological and not conscious etc, and what that means about how we've handled the least of us for the past centuries.
This isn't to throw away the "nature vs nurture" debate entirely but it very clearly is passed through a biological lens on both sides - the nature and nurture are just training set and fine-tuning for a net, there's no inherent "ghost in the machine" but just a series of chemical reactions according to some trained weights and biological machinery. Change the machinery, and you change the person (Phineas Gage, lobotomies, psychiatric drugs, etc). And people really don't like that idea, that what they think of as "consciousness" might just be a low-dimensional projection of the unconscious processing, that the brain has developed as this adjunct facility for language and conceptual processing. Surely the consciousness must be the feature, not the projection, right?
People dug in their heels against this with antidepressants and other things, and the microbiome is an equally uncomfortable topic because of what it says about how our hardware works. It's not even just some chemicals floating around inside our brain that tell it how to work... it involves more or less every part of the body (or at least the metabolic pathway).
[Above is fairly well established in medical literature, the following is speculative:]
Gut microbes may be out-competing "us" for dietary tryptophan, or, alternatively, inflammatory conditions in the GI may trigger the body to send the majority of free tryptophan down the kynurenine pathway, with little left over to make it up to the brain for endogenous neurotransmitter production.
There have been a ton of articles and studies that show fecal transplants (FMT) from a healthy donor are one of the most effective ways to cure an overgrowth of c-diff. I couldn't get a doctors appointment at a specialist for weeks and was desperate so read the studies and methodologies in detail and did it myself. The key is finding a healthy donor. I decided my 8 you son would be perfect as he is super healthy and generally has the same diet as I do. I won't go into all the details but suffice to say the basics involves a mixer, sample, and enema which you then retain for as long as possible (2+ hours ideally).
It was the single most transformative medical treatment I have ever tried. Within a day or two symptoms were down I'd say 80% and within a week I was 100% better (which was confirmed a few weeks later when I finally got an appointment for blood testing and colonoscopy) Not only that I actually felt better than I had in years; consistent brain fog and ADHD symptoms alleviated as did some of my allergies. I was absolutely blown away.
I strongly believe this will eventually be viewed as a go to treatment for all kinds of neurological and other pathological diseases. I could imagine donor samples being further refined to increase or decrease specific micro-organisms contained to better target specific illnesses. There are several companies that have developed fecal transplants that are conducted via pill form in which the outside is sterilized in order to get rid of the ick factor.
>"It's entirely possible gut microbiome is a causative factor (even partial) in the obesity epidemic too. Everyone is obsessed with the CICO idea, but humans are not a blast calorimeter and the actual absorption, satiation, or metabolic paths all have obvious links to the gut microbiome (much more intuitive than the links to neurotransmitters)."
Absolutely. In fact as I was researching fecal transplants I came across a couple of interesting medical case studies in which obesity from the donor was passed to the recipient (which also underscores the importance of donor screening) [1]
This is fascinating to me. I wonder if it would work the other way, that FMT could be used to treat obesity. I figure if FMT from someone with the predisposition for obesity can be transmitted, can whatever causes that predisposition be killed off by FMT from someone who is not obese, the same way it is getting the C-Diff under control.
The problem is that if you are wrong a lot, people stop listening and will not hear you out when you are right.
It is also not very helpful to be right about things when there is no way of telling when you are right or wrong.
As I said, it is not useful to be right about things when you are also wrong a lot and you can't tell which things are wrong and which are right.
Science gives us a way to sort wrong from right. Traditional medicine takes millenia of observation to arrive at simplest things that then can be easily forgotten or misused.
Our "regular" medicine might be wrong a lot and sometimes might even be taking steps back. But overall it is moving in the right direction at a truly lightning speed. It only seem slow to us because of our impatience but, objectively, it has done gigantic progress within just one generation.
Personally the more pressing matter is figuring out a way to make the state of the art medicine available to everybody.
that plus greed and regulatory capture. That affects "regular" and "traditional" medicine both, of course.
The problem with "naturopathic" treatments is that people forget that there are 4 outcomes--not 2. There is treated-got better, didn't treat-didn't get better. Then there are also treated-didn't get better and didn't treat-got better anyway.
A treatment needs to show appropriate statistics in all 4 outcomes. "Treated-got better" loses a lot of its causative power when there are also a lot of "Treated-didn't get better", for example.
Not quite the same issue, but a similar logical space: I sometimes give the example of someone living by a volcano and maintaining a sign that predicts it will not erupt today, claiming 100% accuracy.
Thirty years later, it erupts, and they amend their sign: "99.99% accuracy".
Point being that context and Bayesian prior probability are pretty important.
There is a common trend of diets which simultaneously produce ketones, and starve bacteria/fungi being used to treat disease. It's difficult to know whether it's the microbial mechanism or the metabolic mechanism which is responsible for the effect.
The beta-amyloid connection to Alzheimer's has issues (outright fraud among them), and the opposing viewpoint (that fermented foods, especially those with live active cultures (though admittedly not studying this variant specifically AFAIK), help resist AD or decrease symptoms after onset) has decent supporting literature as well.
This is interesting to me. Do you have a link to a good overview of the fermented foods argument?
Which entities would have financial motives to have people eat less sugar and flour? Specially consider how big the industries behind those two are.
This is a tangent but Herbal supplements are a billion dollar industry.
I was never close to being "bad enough" to go see a doctor for fatigue or anything like that, but it's the difference between "OK" and "great." One of the things I noticed is that when I am doing this diet, my skin clears up while when I am off it, I get slight rashes. Again not bad enough to see a doctor but indication that a diet rich in sugars/carbs allows enough yeast to propagate that it shows up in superficial rashes (so imagine what's going on inside the body.)
I have no idea the connection between it and Alzheimers, but there's probably a crisp connection between "clean diet" and "good health" and then between "good health" and "ability to fend off disease like Alzheimers"
There's always going to be people who will say "oh this is not definitively proven so I am not going to get excited about it" and that's fine but it also feels like missing a lot of opportunity to leverage a bunch of empirical observation to your advantage, and feel better (and look better!) in the process.
There are diseases out there that can cause rashes, but you might not realize you actually have the condition. Since you mention diet, Crohn's and celiac disease can both cause rashes that come and go, for example, and correlate with disease activity.
I would not jump to yeast as the first obvious explanation.
While your point stands, I think my point does too - even in spaces where you don't get a crisp diagnosis or a scientifically proven link, the empirical observations are valuable and actionable.
- Traumatic head injury
- Potentially increases risk: getting more viral infections (getting the common cold very often).
- Depression
- Cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease
- Born to older parents
- Smoking.
- Family history of dementia
- Increased homocysteine levels (B vitamins, hypothyroidism, smoking, excess alcohol, aging)
- Having the APOE e4 allele (which can be mitigated through diet).
Then, more recent discoveries point to the roles of:
- Sleep: detoxifies our brain.
- Exercise: detoxifies the brain and stimulates neuronal growth.
- Cribiform plate ossification through aging: somehow prevents detoxification of substances in the brain.
- Bacteria that causes gingivitis: found to get to the brain, promote inflammation, and its increased presence is found among biopsied brains for thoss who had Alzheimer's.
- Candida albicans, as this paper describes.
Supplements being studied to somehow benefit Alzheimer's:
- Curcumin: supplements like Longvida potentially help, but at doses much higher than those listed on supplement bottles. Other forms are also being investigated.
- Magnesium threonate: gets more magnesium into the brain. Some MDs testify of what they did for their Alzheimer's patients. Still being studied.
Things that probably don't help:
- Donepezil: still being given to patients, but data now suggests it's not very useful.
That's all I can recall from memory. Very interesting disease.
- VZV & HSV1 Alzheimer's; and so Gardasil9+ for all?
> However, according to a review of research published in 2022, no HSV vaccine has received FDA approval yet. This is despite eight decades worth of effort to develop a vaccine.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5235726399437456270...
> The researchers expressed hope that current developments of the mRNA vaccines due to COVID-19 may help in finding a solution sooner
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(23)01252-4....
I love hearing the "what", but would also appreciate some speculation on the "why". Does this fungus somehow thrive better because of some underlying issue? Is some natural process that usually would clean up these Ab-like peptides being suppressed?
Common enough they let you buy the antimicrobial treatments off the shelf.
Candida albicans is just a type of yeast that grows in the human gut and is one of the common causes of thrush (i.e. a yeast infection).
So it's uh pretty much everywhere.
"Here, the researchers show that the Ab-like peptides also can be generated from a different source – C. albicans. Credit: Neuroscience News"
It wouldn’t be that surprising for GP’s to notice a trend in an ad-hoc fashion, right? They have direct contact with the biggest dataset… patients.
Since they are respected professionals with licenses and training I’m sure there’s a way for the research community to hear from them and start systematizing their observations… or at least, I sure hope there is!
Sounds like another supplement scam.
There is. Nothing stops a GP from writing a paper and submitting it. All they have to do is keep track (for a particular symptom) of the exact symptoms, the treatment supplied and ask followup "did it work" questions the next time the patient visits.
They already do this, but per-patient.
New approaches to medicine often start with case studies before anyone invests in a rigorous RCT. Are there any such case studies where a patient was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, the clinician treated them for candida albicans infection, and symptoms approved? That wouldn't necessarily prove anything but it would indicate a possible approach for further research.
I don't know what the difference is between a "functional medical practitioner" and a "medical practitioner".
> This was poo pooed as not being evidence based due to lack of rigorous RCTs,
Well, unless there's evidence, a conjecture is still just a conjecture, right?
After all, the people in the article had a conjecture, so they went to look for evidence.
This is difficult to do within the current US medical system. Practitioners need a deep understanding of the interactions between multiple organ systems and biochemical pathways. And it takes a lot more time than a typical 10 minute office visit.
There are also a lot of quacks pushing pseudoscience woo.
Where it isn’t, it’s often incorporated into medicine—its practitioners pretend to be persecuted as a marketing tactic. (A lot of “food-based medicine”, i.e. targeted nutrition, falls into this category.)
The reality is that non-alternative medicine is that subset of medicine which has been regulatory captured. Whatever medicine couldn't be made profitable was then deemed alternative and relegated to the quacks. It's a shame we've handed health and medicine to big business on a silver platter.
As I said, useless or harmful. If super diluted, useless. If insufficiently so, harmful.
> Whatever medicine couldn't be made profitable was then deemed alternative and relegated to the quacks
This is nonsense. If your doctor is never recommending e.g. a diet change or physical exercise or even PT, and only prescribing medication, get a new doctor. Most medical research is not pharmaceutical.
Everything I know about my condition is from alternative medicine. Mainstream doctors simply throw their hands up.
Most things alternative doctors say about it are crap, but I'm grateful that with some investigation, the truth turns out to be well-explored.
You gotta be honest with yourself:
1. Anything that is claimed to work gets tested.
2. Anything showing efficacy in double-blind trials get taken up almost immediately.
3. The only stuff left on the table, then, is the stuff that was tested and was found to perform no better than a placebo. This is where all the alternative medicines lie, on the efficacy spectrum.
Of course the people selling drinking water or acupuncture sessions are going to claim that "the establishment" has never bothered to test their product - why would they tell you that it's been tested and relegated to "alternative" medicine?
The sad fact is that there are a large number (few million, at least) of Phd candidates every year looking to publish a thesis about a drug/process/medicine/practice that is effectively a new cure for something.
They will get insanely rich, and famous, and get invited to give talks and get tenure if even one of the currently popular alternative medicines work better than a placebo.
You need to ask yourself "Is it really possible that every single graduating student of the bio and medical sciences are either bought off by big pharma or too stupid to get this easily reachable fame and fortune?"
Your answer to that question, to yourself, is enough - you don't need to reply to me telling me how $FOO successfully demonized $WORKING_MEDICINE - you need t simply ask yourself why millions of grad students haven't jumped at this opportunity for themselves.
What does that have to do with scientists? I've said how huge fame and fortunes are sitting on the table for the first person who can find evidence for the popular alternative medicines.
What medical doctors do, or don't do, is irrelevant, because medical doctors aren't in the business of determining what works and what doesn't, they prescribe only what has already been tested to work. Their job isn't to run tests to determine what works, it's to diagnose and treat using known working medication.
If your complaint is that medical doctors don't prescribe alternative medicines, then your beef is not with doctors, but with the science that tested them and found them not to work.
I have experience working with a CRO, and unfortunately, the statement isn't entirely accurate. Not every novel molecule or treatment receives the clinical evaluation it deserves. Clinical studies are incredibly costly, and even if a drug is theoretically just as effective as the standard treatment but with fewer side effects, it might not receive approval. The same holds for treatments with slightly improved efficacy, and so forth.
>3. The only stuff left on the table, then, is the stuff that was tested and was found to perform no better than a placebo. This is where all the alternative medicines lie, on the efficacy spectrum.
The primary challenge lies in the need for funding to conduct these studies. There are natural compounds that can be equally as efficient as their synthetic counterparts, with fewer side effects. Another problem is that natural compounds often cannot be patented.