Dementia

I’m not aware of anyone who’s had any demonstrable success training Alzheimer’s.  It is a physiological destruction of the ability to get signals across the synapses.  Speeding up or slowing down the EEG doesn’t seem to have any effect in the cases I’ve tried or heard of.

To date my “n” is small–only four that I recall (though my memory may be failing).  In none of those cases–trying everything I knew, including assessment-based protocols, audio-visual entrainment, etc.–I never saw anything that approximated a change that had any legs at all.  We sometimes thought that something might have been a bit better immediately following a session, but continued training of whatever that was never seemed to produce the same effect.  I was well aware of that desire to be “slowing down” the rate of deterioration, and there were times when I could briefly convince myself that maybe I was–but in the end, I didn’t ever find anything that really worked. I tried AVS, HEG, a variety of neurofeedback approaches in a variety of areas. The amplitude of EEG tends to be very small in these folks, due to the loss of neurons and the loss of synapses as the brain deteriorates, so it’s not easy to train anything but reward protocols.

The few people I’ve spoken with who claimed to get results from neurofeedback with Alzheimer’s, when I questioned them more closely as to how they determined this, reported, “well, we think we are slowing the rate of decline.” Since that’s an impossible one to know, it wouldn’t be enough for me.  If the family wanted to continue, I’d help them do so, but so far I’ve not seen anything convincing that shows much hope in this area.

In the case of Alzheimer’s, there was some very interesting work done several years ago in Australia where the brains of deceased AD sufferers were looked at in great detail.  One remarkable finding was that in every single site, 100%, where there was an amyloid plaque, there was also a sign of an old “micro-bleed” a tiny broken blood vessel, suggesting that there had been tiny hemorrhages throughout the brain, and that the plaque might, in some way, have been a response to those. This would fit with the finding in several studies that AD is much more likely to be a problem in people who lived with very high stress levels (as their blood pressure increases, vessel flexibility decreases and these micro strokes are more likely to occur).

The implications of what I know about AD are that we really want to reduce blood pressure and, of course, stress as early as possible in order to minimize the chances of having it hit. The best use of NF, in my opinion, would be to work with people earlier in their lives and help improve their response to stress in an ongoing way, so they weren’t as likely to develop the problem in the first place.