The Alzheimer's disease and the bloodstream-brain barrier

When the brain of patients with Alzheimer's disease was analysed, there was an entire list of disease-causing bacteria, viruses and fungi, and while they were not enough to indicate encefalitis or meningitis, the low levels of pathogens will slowly wear down your defences, making your brain to function suboptimally. It was not really like an all-out war, but more like a sabotage. These findings are both surprising and concerning, as previous it was hypothetised that Alzheimer's disease (AD) is not infectious. 

Oral bacteria have been found repeatedly in the brain of people suffering with AD , as some of their excretions (protein based) were found also. The culprits are Porphyromonas gingivalis. Fusobacterium nucleatun and Prevotella intermedia. Herpex simplex virus (HSV) can live for decades in the nerve cells from your face and lips (trigeminal ganglion cells), causing cold sores when you are stressed or sunburned, but they can also migrate through the same nerve into the brain, producing mild, chronic inflammation, associated with AD. 

Syphilis causing bacterium - Treponema pallidum, can live in the body for years, eventually infecting the brain and causing dementia. AD seems to activate a similar pathway, but instead of one single organism causing this, in the case of AD, the mild chronic inflammtion seems to be caused by many different microorganisms associated together. 

Another notable presence, The Lyme disease spirochete - Borrelia burgdorferi, has been found in the brain of AD patients. This one is carried by a deer tick in most of the cases, and you can get it when the tick bite you and inject you with its saliva. Sometimes you will get some additional friends of Borrelia, such as Ehrlichia (infecting white blood cells), Bartonella (infecting blood vessels) or Babesia (relative of malaria parasite, attacking red blood cells). A very dangerous coktail. Want more distressing news? There are also some fungi that can be found in the brain of the AD patients. There is no single organism to cause AD, but the main problem may be the response to so many different infectious agents. 

Normally the brain is well protected by the blood-brain barrier, with few rare cases when this barrier can break down, similar with the leaky gut issue. Sometimes is the nose ( a known problem of cocaine users), sometimes is the gut (via the vagus nerve) and in very rare cases through the eye. All the dementogens will use one of these routes (dementogen - causal factor of dementia, like in cancerigen - cancer). In AD, the abnormalities related to the blood-brain barrier tend to appear very early, and there are substantial claims related to the link between the nasal and sinusal acces to the brain and the AD type 3. 

The test to verify this issue it is called Cyrex Array 20, and the result must be, obviously, negative. 

Next post will be about gluten related sensitivities.

Have a wonderful day!

G.