Jean Carper's Blog

Jean Carper Discusses Alzheimer’s Prevention with Katie Couric

On October 12, 2010, Jean Carper sat down with Katie Couric to talk about her new book “100 Simple Things You Can Do To Prevent Alzheimer’s.” She discusses the potential role that multivitamins can play in maintaining cognitive health, how caffeine can help fight the disease, as well as the issues that many caregivers face when caring for someone with Alzheimer’s.

Here are some highlights. The full interview is available at CBSNews.com.

How Important Are Multivitamins?

Caffeine Good for the Brain?

The Role of Caregivers, and Online Support

Click here to view the entire interview at CBSNews.com.

Blueberries Among Top Tips to Avoid Alzheimer’s – Jean Carper on PBS NewsHour

On September 30, 2010, Jean Carper was interviewed by Betty Ann Bowser from PBS NewsHour to discuss her new book “100 Simple Things You Can Do To Prevent Alzheimer’s.” The video and article are available on their website.

Click here to watch Jean’s interview.

Jean Carper on NBC 4 – 100 Simple Things You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s

On September 16, 2010, best-selling author Jean Carper spoke to NBC 4′s Barbara Harrison (Washington, D.C). about her latest book “100 Simple Things You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s and Age-Related Memory Loss’.” Jean gave Barbara’s viewers some surprising advice on how to slow down and avoid this devastating disease— check it out!

Sarah Palin Spoof Commercial for New Book Has Everybody Laughing

Click below for outtakes and bloopers from a Sarah Palin video and spoof commercial for “100 Simple Things You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s” by New York Times Best Selling Author Jean Carper.

Whatever your feelings about Sarah Palin, this new book commercial will have you laughing along with impersonator actress Mimi McDonald, as she tries time and again to get the title of Jean Carper’s new book right. The commerical has been heralded in publishing circles and on blogs as “brilliant, hilarious, awesome.”  Take a look, and pass it on. to your friends.

It’s One Train You Want to Miss–the Alzheimer’s Express

The following opinion piece by Jean Carper appeared on the CNN Webpage:



By Jean Carper, Special to CNN October 10, 2010 –

(CNN) — After age 60, we are all likely passengers on the Alzheimer’s Express. These days it’s overcrowded with baby boomers and is predicted by 2050 to claim 115 million victims worldwide, including 13.5 million Americans (up from 5.1 million today), bankrupting our health care system.

That will happen, says a recent Alzheimer’s Association report, unless we slow down this terrible disease.

The good news is: Most of us can. It’s true that pharmaceutical drugs have failed miserably to stop or reverse the disease. A cure is not on the immediate horizon. “Maybe not for 100 years, or ever,” says Dr. Jack C. de la Torre, a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher at the National Institutes of Health-funded Banner Sun Health Research Institute in Arizona.

“The answer,” he says, as do thousands of other Alzheimer’s researchers, “is prevention,” the same strategy we use against other chronic diseases of aging, such as heart disease. The evidence that we can cut our risk of Alzheimer’s is compelling and mounting constantly.

It is true that your vulnerability to Alzheimer’s and other dementias is definitely influenced by your genes. Early onset Alzheimer’s, before age 60, is caused by genetic mutations and is thus quite strongly inherited.But in late-onset Alzheimer’s, which appears after age 60 and accounts for 90 to 95 percent of all cases, genes are not destiny; they simply make us more susceptible. I have the major “susceptibility gene” known as ApoE4, that triples my risk of developing Alzheimer’s in late life. Seventy-seven million other Americans (25 percent of the population) also carry it.

But Alzheimer’s is more of a personal and public health choice than most people realize, as shown by thousands of scientific papers on the subject.

“A lot of Alzheimer’s is about lifestyle — what you do and even who you are, your personality,” says prominent Alzheimer’s researcher Robert Wilson at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center. Effective deterrents to Alzheimer’s, according to Wilson: a higher education, staying mentally active, eating the right foods, exercising, muscle-building and being conscientious, easy-going and an extrovert.

Much research ties Alzheimer’s to the same lifestyle factors that cause heart attacks and strokes: high cholesterol, blood pressure, high blood sugar, insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity and physical inactivity. “Taking care of your heart protects your brain,” says De la Torre. He urges preventing Alzheimer’s by screening for and treating cardiovascular disease in middle age, years before signs of memory loss and dementia appear.

Two other striking ways to ward off Alzheimer’s: Stop smoking and avoid heavy drinking, especially binge drinking. Smoking doubles your risk of Alzheimer’s, according to a recent University of California, San Francisco analysis. Excessive alcohol brings on Alzheimer’s two to three years earlier, UCLA scientists found.

Bottom line: Most Alzheimer’s, like heart disease and cancer, is a slowly developing chronic disease of aging that takes a decade or more to produce memory loss and dementia. Its progression is accelerated or slowed by diet, personality, lifestyle factors and other health conditions, such as treatable thyroid abnormalities and depression.

Thus, we all have many years in which to stall this disease and perhaps outlive its devastating symptoms.

If we could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s by only five years, 1.6 million Americans now expected to get Alzheimer’s by 2015, and 6 million by 2050, would be spared, according to the Alzheimer’s Association projections. Estimated Medicare savings would be $33 billion in 2020 and $283 billion by midcentury.

We can each help save ourselves by intervening as early as possible before the disease seizes our brain and memory loss is irreversible. The older we get, the greater our risk. About half of all people over age 85 have Alzheimer’s.

Our best hope for defeating the looming global tragedy of Alzheimer’s, due to the rapid growth of an aging population, is to keep millions of people from boarding the Alzheimer’s Express in the first place, or at least to show them how to jump off before the final destination, which offers no hope of a round-trip ticket.

New Harris Poll Reveals Americans Believe Alzheimer’s is Preventable

American baby boomers are upbeat about their chances of avoiding and slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, and do not believe it is entirely genetic, according to a new Harris Poll, released for World Alzheimer’s Day, Tuesday, September 21.

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed said they “strongly or somewhat disagreed” with the statement: “There is little a person can do to avoid developing Alzheimer’s and losing their memory as a result of it as they get older.”

Moreover, fifty-two percent “strongly or somewhat agreed” with the statement: “There is some real evidence that if a person eats healthy foods and regularly exercises and maintains good health that they can be prevented from developing Alzheimer’s entirely.”

The Harris Interactive online poll was conducted among 538 adults aged 60 and over during the week of September 9-13, and commissioned by Little, Brown and Company, publishers of bestselling author Jean Carper’s 100 Simple Things You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s and Age-Related Memory Loss ( Little Brown/September 20, 2010 ).

Carper, who carries the major gene for late onset Alzheimer’s ( after age 60, ) said she was “totally surprised and heartened by the results.” “This means the public is far ahead of a recent government panel’s conclusion that there’s little or nothing you can do to slow down or prevent Alzheimer’s. Despite the constant dreary headlines that Alzheimer’s is hopeless and inevitable, most older Americans, fortunately, are not buying that message,” said Carper.

“I believe many Alzheimer’s researchers will be cheered and surprised to learn they are making progress in changing the prevailing view of Alzheimer’s from one of no hope to one of hope and prevention,” she added.

The new Harris Poll also disputes the commonly held belief that Alzheimer’s’ is genetically determined from birth. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they “strongly or somewhat disagreed” that “Alzheimer’s is something a person is born with and is likely to develop in old age.”

Eighty percent also “strongly or somewhat agreed” that “There is some real evidence that if a person eats healthy foods and regularly exercises and maintains good health that the progression of Alzheimer’s can be slowed.”

World Alzheimer’s Day: 10 Tips to Prevent Alzheimer’s

As seen in the Huffington Post:

How are you celebrating World Alzheimer’s Day today? Of course, it’s hardly a celebration, since the idea is to focus on the awful fact that Alzheimer’s is about to swamp us with the worst epidemic the world has ever seen–115 million cases, including 13.5 million Americans (up from 5.1 million today) by 2050, and the collapse of our health care system, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, one of the organizers of this Day, on September 21.

One way to try to hold back this catastrophe, brought on by aging baby boomers, is spending more on research. The National Institutes of Health now antes up a paltry $527 million a year to study Alzheimer’s, compared to $6.1 billion for cancer, $3 billion for HIV/AIDS, and $1.9 billion for heart disease. NIH should up Alzheimer’s research money to at least $2 billion annually, say experts.

In the meantime, don’t expect a cure anytime soon. The last big test of a miracle drug, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, actually made Alzheimer’s worse.Right now, your best bet for escaping Alzheimer’s is to save yourself. And prominent Alzheimer’s researchers have already figured out countless ways to do it. Here are 10 things they will be doing on World Alzheimer’s Day–and do every day–and say you should do, too, to keep Alzheimer’s out of your future.

1. Take a hike: Nothing beats walking for boosting memory and flooding your brain with chemicals that serve as “Miracle-Gro” to create bigger neurons. Take a brisk 30-minute walk, or three 10-minute sessions on a treadmill. A “nature” walk through a park also improves memory.

2. Eat an apple or two: Apples stimulate production of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is what the Alzheimer’s drug Aricept also does, say University of Massachusetts researchers. You get the same benefits from two eight-ounce glasses of apple juice.

3. Drink a few cups of coffee: “I try to drink five cups of coffee a day,” says Gary Arendash at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. He says the caffeine blocks build up of Alzheimer’s brain toxins. In one study, drinking three to five cups of coffee a day cut Alzheimer’s risk 65 percent.

4. Treat yourself to a little dark chocolate: It can boost blood circulation in your brain, lower blood pressure and inhibit stroke damage, all important in preventing Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Be sure cocoa content is at least 70 percent. Even a half ounce of rich dark chocolate a day may be enough.

5. Surf the internet for an hour: Yes, a good Google search can stimulate an older brain and possibly improve thinking and memory. So can playing video games, and doing certain online brain games. For some that have been scientifically tested, check out www.positscience.com.

6. Do something new: Your brain cells are stimulated when you think of or do anything new. People who do novel mental activities reduce their risk of cognitive decline. Important: you must make a mental effort; breezing through crossword puzzles doesn’t count.

7. Eat a cup of berries: If you want to make forgetful old lab animals “younger and smarter,” just feed them blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries or cranberries, say Tufts University researchers. How much? At least a cup a day.

8. Take a multivitamin: It can slow brain aging, especially if it includes high antioxidants, such as C, E and alpha lipoic acid. Be sure to get 500 mcg B12, 800 mcg folic acid, 20 mg B6 a day–doses found to reduce brain shrinkage up to 50 percent in people with mild memory problems.

9. Have a Curry Meal: A constituent of curry spices known as curcumin blocks Alzheimer’s-like brain damage and boosts memory in animal and lab tests. India, where curry is a staple, has a very low rate of Alzheimer’s.

10. Get together with friends and family: Make it a point to yak it up today, the larger your circle of friends and family, the better. Extroverts with high “social engagement” have less cognitive failure as they age. Being married or having a significant other dramatically cuts your odds of developing Alzheimer’s.

If we all do everything we can to save our own brains from Alzheimer’s, we may one day actually be celebrating World Alzheimer’s Day as a victory over this human tragedy.

Experts Dispute New York Times Article Saying You Can Do Nothing to Prevent Alzheimer’s

by Jean Carper

(From the Huffington Post (Huffington.post.com) , September 3, 2010

Why is the Sunday New York Times running four-month-old news on its front page?

Should we worry that the Gray Lady, now 159 years old, is slowing down?

I am referring to the article, “Years Later, No Magic Bullet Against Alzheimer’s Disease,” by Gina Kolata in the Times on August 29, 2010. The piece rehashes what other news media reported last April—that an outside panel of non-Alzheimer’s experts, convened by the National Institutes of Health, concluded there was not enough reliable evidence to recommend ways to prevent or slow the disease and that much more research was needed. “The jury’s verdict was depressing and distressing,” Kolata wrote.    



Distressing indeed, especially to some leading Alzheimer’s researchers and organizations, including the prestigious Alzheimer’s Association, who vigorously disagree with the conclusion; but such controversy was barely mentioned in Ms. Kolata’s article.

A more enlightening account of the NIH conference report appeared on the Alzheimer Research Forum,  an online blog (alzforum.org) where experts, primarily from medical institutions, exchange ideas and information about the disease.

A blog post by science writer Madolyn Bowman Rogers on May 7 noted that the NIH panel reviewed 300 studies and concluded that they “consistently associated” a higher risk of Alzheimer’s with diabetes, depression and current tobacco use and “consistently associated” a lower risk of Alzheimer’s with physical activity, a Mediterranean diet (low in saturated fat, high in grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish and olive oil) and high levels of cognitive activity.  However, the NIH panel judged the level of the evidence “low” for all of these interventions. 

And why the “low” evidence rating? Because not enough studies have been done to prove the interventions work; there is a lack of consistent research, primarily due to under-funding. However, it’s important to point out that a “low” level of evidence does not mean the studies are of poor quality.  As Neil Buckholtz, director of the Dementias of Aging Branch at the National Institute on Aging, explained, “We don’t yet have enough information to make specific recommendations.”

In a later blog comment, Dr. John Breitner from the University of Washington School of Medicine, put it  succinctly: “Absence of proof is not proof of absence.” In other words, just because we don’t know, doesn’t mean the proof doesn’t exist.

The Alzheimer’s Association applauded the NIH panel’s call for additional research, but disagreed with their conclusion that “current research is inadequate to make health recommendations.”  Maria Carrillo, the Association’s representative, underscored the fact that studies do show “brain health can make a difference in our future in terms of Alzheimer’s risk,” and said the Association would continue to make recommendations to stay physically, socially and mentally active and to adopt a brain healthy diet as a possible help in lowering the risk of Alzheimer’s.   

Even Dr. Buckholtz of NIH contradicted the logic of the panel’s determination that you can do nothing to save yourself from Alzheimer’s.Their report, he says, “is suggestive that there are some things you can do, in terms of a healthy diet, a healthy lifestyle to maintain a healthy brain.”  He recommends physical exercise, social interactions, reducing high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and making lifestyle choices that reduce the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  

Dr. Kenneth Kosik, professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara commented that the NIH panel’s threshold of evidence undermines public health efforts to promote healthy behaviors. He also challenged the advisability of holding recommendations, such as exercise and diet, to the same standards of proof required of potent drugs.  

Trying to design a double-blind pharmaceutical-style study to evaluate lifestyle factors involved in Alzheimer’s is absurd, he suggested. It would be unethical to have a control group. “The NIH panel does not seriously believe,” he said, “that we will conduct trials in which subjects will be randomized to a control group and told not to treat their hypertension, follow a poor diet, or refrain from exercise.” 

He is correct. Why should the general public remain hopeless while medical bureaucrats fiddle and fuss over how much evidence is enough to merit telling us that healthy endeavors like exercising, eating well, using our  brains and taking care of our general health might also lessen our odds of Alzheimer’s? How much larger should the Alzheimer’s toll get before experts speak out in favor of ways to prevent it?

The first alarm that smoking causes lung cancer was sounded as far back as 1950 in both the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Medical Journal, (4).  Both prestigious journals declared that smoking more than doubled the risk of lung cancer. They presented the same type evidence the NIH panel found insufficient—observational or epidemiological studies. British and American medical officials and organizations ignored the evidence as an “association” not a cause.  Sound familiar? 

Not until the first U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health in 1964 bucked mainstream medicine and massive tobacco industry propaganda to declare smoking a deadly hazard did smoking rates begin to drop from 42 percent in adults in 1965 to 21 percent in 2006.  

That history should warn us to ignore the NIH panel and the depressing, recycled news in the Sunday New York Times and to trust our own survival instincts. As the Alzheimer’s Association and many leading researchers advise, it makes sense to try to cut our risk of Alzheimer’s now, rather than wait for a thumbs up from some future government panel, possibly years from now, when it may be too late to save millions of us and a medical system bankrupted by the disease.

Small Heads, More Alzheimer’s

by Jean Carper

Yikes! That’s how I feel about a new finding that smaller head-size boosts Alzheimer’s progression. I have enough to worry about with my ApoE4 gene that triples my odds of getting the disease, and now a small head, too.  German researchers affiliated with the Technical University of Munich spread this news via the highly respected medical journal Neurology.



It appears they dutifully put a tape measure around the heads of 270 Alzheimer’s patients. They also gave them memory tests and scans to judge the extent of brain cell death. For those of us with small heads, the conclusions were distressingly blunt:  Among people with equal loss of brain cells, large heads outperformed small heads on memory and thinking tests. For every additional centimeter of head size, the score on a memory test jumped six percent!  It sounds like a lot to me. The brains in small heads were also more atrophied.

The team, led by Robert Perneczky, points out that your brain reaches 93 percent of its final size at age six. That’s about when I remember being fitted for a hat for a school event. A teacher put a filler inside so the cap didn’t fall down over my eyes.  Little did I suspect the significance.

Head size is not due entirely to genetics, however, the German neuroscientists note. Early poor nutrition, infections and inflammations, and brain injuries might thwart head growth. I did suffer a bad fall as a toddler, but I am reluctant to blame my mother for carelessly feeding me.

Nevertheless, I do understand that cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s can be influenced by  prenatal and early life conditions reflected in head size. There’s other evidence that good memory and brain structure formed in utero persist through life and into old age. So it makes sense to encourage optimal head and brain development during the earliest years.

Still, it’s hard to accept that my irreversible small head circumference is pushing me closer to Alzheimer’s. But maybe all the mental and physical exercise I do will compensate by keeping more brain cells alive and spurring the birth of new ones. I’m sure those guys in Munich who measured the small and large heads know that’s possible, too.

We with small heads just have to try harder to build stronger brains to resist the onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms longer.

Looking for Alzheimer’s Answers in All the Wrong Places

by Jean Carper

From the Huffington Post (Huffingtonpost.com) August 27

The news about Alzheimer’s is dismal. A new Eli Lilly drug to treat Alzheimer’s has failed big-time. After investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the drug, Semagacestat, the company announced it made patients worse.



And the latest idea from an elite circle of Alzheimer’s researchers is to torture us with diagnostic spinal taps and brain scans, so we can know ten years in advance if we are heading lickety split into Alzheimer’s even though specialists admit they have no treatment to stop it and are even losing faith in their long-held theories of what causes it. “This is a time of major soul-searching in the field,” lamented Duke University researcher, Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, in the New York Times.

As a person who carries the major gene, ApoE4 for Alzheimer’s, I am intensely tuned into and disturbed by this public conversation. The gene triples my risk of ending up with Alzheimer’s. Some 77 million other Americans also carry ApoE4 (25 percent of the population), but few know it, and doctors are reluctant to test and tell, supposedly because they don’t want to scare us. I accidentally discovered my gene via a blood test for cholesterol factors several years ago, and I’m glad I did, because it energized me to search for answers other than those from Big Pharma and its philosophical collaborators.

I have discovered a large contingent of Alzheimer’s researchers who are extremely positive about prevention and not counting on an elusive drug to stymie the growing Alzheimer’s epidemic of aging baby boomers. Investigators Gregory Cole and Sally Frautschy at UCLA’s Center for Alzheimer’s Research and Gary W.Arendash, PhD, at the Florida Alzheimer’s Research Center, for example, are all focusing on prevention. There is a plethora of upbeat dialogue in the scientific community that does not grab headlines because it’s not about big money and a magic cure. It’s primarily about what people can do to change their own trajectory toward Alzheimer’s.

Contrast the recent disturbing headlines in the New York Times about Alzheimer’s drugs and diagnosis with the June, 2010 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. It is a special issue devoted to finding ways to prevent Alzheimer’s. Editors in chief George Perry, University of Texas at San Antonio and Mark A. Smith, Case Western Reserve, (who predicted the failure of Lilly’s drug and others like it,) and guest editor, Jack de la Torre at the Center for Alzheimer’s Research, Banner Sun Health Research Institute in Arizona all endorse the science showing how this disease can be cut off at the pass earlier in life.

Dr. de la Torre boldly asserts that finding a cure for Alzheimer’s is a delusionary quest unlikely to happen in a hundred years and most probably, never. He argues that even if you could replace dead neuronal networks, bringing a shrunken Alzheimer’s brain back to life, the persona and intellect of the individual would be so altered as to create a different personality. “Alzheimer’s is incurable, but it is preventable,” he says. “We need to identify and lower Alzheimer’s risk factors in people when they are still cognitively normal and long before irreversible symptoms appear.”

While the search for a pharmaceutical cure plays front and center, quietly in the background countless neuroscientists worldwide have concluded that Alzheimer’s, as well as memory decline and other age-related dementias are actually slow-developing chronic diseases, like heart disease and cancer, partly dependent on lifestyle and other treatable diseases.

De la Torre, for example, is convinced that Alzheimer’s and dementia are particularly tied to cardiovascular factors, notably, constricted blood flow to brain cells, and that midlife screening to detect and correct such heart-related deficits would help prevent much brain degeneration during aging. The special journal issue produced by de la Torre, called “Basics of Alzheimer’s Disease Prevention,” also included new research on the relationship between Alzheimer’s and diabetes, high blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol and cholesterol- lowering drugs, (statins), a Mediterranean diet, exercise, fish oil, B vitamins and antioxidants.

This special issue of JAD is but the latest example of a shifting paradigm toward prevention. Other leading medical journals are full of studies, often funded by your tax dollars, filtered through the National Institutes of Health, revealing the dangers of alcohol, smoking, toxic chemicals, head injuries, infections, certain forms of anesthesia, excess copper, low vitamin B, excess calories, obesity, diabetes, thyroid problems, sleep deprivation, and depression in raising your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

The wisdom of Alzheimer’s prevention, derived from the famous Nun Study at the University of Minnesota, and the Religious Orders Study, at Rush University in Chicago, has been piling up for a decade or two, but is rarely put into practice. Comparing brains at autopsy with lifestyle and cognitive status allows investigators to proclaim the value of mental, social and physical stimulation in building a brain more resistant to Alzheimer’s. Best time to start: when you are young, but even activity in old age can make a huge difference.

Prolific research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, UCLA, Tufts University and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, as well as dozens of other institutions, reveals a reduced Alzheimer’s risk from consuming berries, nuts, curry powder, fruits and vegetables, fatty fish, olive oil and the Mediterranean diet, and various supplements, including folic acid, alpha lipoic acid, Vitamin B12, multivitamins and vitamin D.

We are missing the boat when we allow a small fragment of the scientific conversation about Alzheimer’s, centered on ineffective pharmaceuticals and frightening diagnostic methods, drown out the momentous message coming from another research perspective: that we can take action right now to delay the progression and onset of Alzheimer’s which happens over decades. The good news is that we know now how to detect and lessen many midlife lifestyle problems that may otherwise lead to irreversible dementia. The approach is much the same, Dr. De la Torre points out, as we now use extensively to prevent heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases of aging.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean we should stop searching for treatments for the underlying causes and symptoms of Alzheimer’s and other dementias or spare funding to relieve those already suffering.

But it is urgent that we have a vigorous dialogue about how to rescue the multitudes now racing at breakneck speed toward Alzheimer’s. Unless we intervene, Alzheimer’s cases in the United States will nearly triple. A May Alzheimer’s Association report, “Changing the Trajectory of Alzheimer’s Disease,” predicts that cases will jump from 5.1 million to 13.5 million by 2050 with costs during that period exceeding $20 trillion in today’s dollars.

If we could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s by only five years, according to the report, some 1.6 million Americans expected to get Alzheimer’s by 2015 and nearly 6 million scheduled to get it by 2050 would remain free of it while Medicare savings would be $33 billion in 2020 and $283 billion by mid century.

The only way to make that happen is to start talking as loudly about preventing Alzheimer’s — and listening to the researchers who can tell us how to do that — as we do about trying to cure it.