Does this cheap vitamin roll back Alzheimer’s?

I get a lot of guys asking me about Alzheimer’s for their wives or mothers or fathers.

One man’s father had just been diagnosed. Mild, early, still driving, still telling the same jokes. But maybe repeating those jokes a bit too often. Not remembering questions he has just asked. You know how it can get, probably.

The neurologist offered him an infusion drug. Twice a month, an hour in a chair, and regular brain scans to check for bleeding.

He asked me what the drug does.

Here is what it does. In the big trial of 1,795 people, the drug moved the standard dementia rating scale by 0.45 points over eighteen months.

That scale runs from 0 to 18. So: 0.45 points.

And brain swelling showed up in 12.6 out of every 100 people on the drug, versus 1.7 out of every 100 on placebo. That is roughly one extra person in nine with fluid in their brain who would not have had it otherwise.

Doesn’t seem particularly effective to me.

That is what thirty years and something north of forty billion dollars of poorly thought through amyloid research bought.

Now. Everybody in this business has a theory about why. The plaque theory is wrong. The plaque theory is right but the drugs are late. The plaque is a bystander. Pick your favorite.

I have had my own theory for about fifteen years, and I have repeated it more times than I can count.

The theory is that Alzheimer’s is not a plaque disease at all. It is an energy disease. The neurons are not being clogged. They are being starved.

And there is a vitamin — a real vitamin, over the counter, a few dollars a bottle, sitting on the shelf at every drugstore in America — that in 2008 reversed the memory deficits in Alzheimer’s mice.

You might say, “Matt, somebody needs to test that vitamin in actual human beings.”

Here is the thing.

They did.

Forty-seven people with confirmed Alzheimer’s. 3,000 milligrams a day. Forty-eight weeks. Spinal taps at the start and spinal taps at the end.

The trial finished. The results were published in a major neurology journal. And the one-line summary that went out to the world was: it did not work.

I believed that summary for months. I was wrong. Somehow.

But last week I sat down and actually read the paper.

Then I read the second paper, the one almost nobody covered, where the same group went back and measured what happened to the vitamin inside the patients’ bodies.

What is in those two papers is not what anybody told me was in them. Not even close.

The second paper explains, in plain arithmetic, exactly why the trial “failed” — and it has nothing to do with the vitamin being useless.

Something in the brains of these patients was destroying the vitamin before it ever arrived.

Let me tell you what I thought was going on, because I was wrong about it, and I would rather say so.

Here is the story I had been telling myself, and the story a lot of smart people in my corner of the internet have been telling each other.

In 2008 a vitamin reversed Alzheimer’s in mice. A human trial was started at a big university. And then — silence. No results. No publication. Nothing.

And the reason for the silence, the story goes, is obvious. If a three-dollar drugstore vitamin cured Alzheimer’s, that would be the end of a very large amount of money.