Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
Click the orange button to the right to learn more about what you can start doing today.
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Multiple Myeloma Survivor Heals Chemobrain, DVT, Heart Disease…more!
To our knowledge this is the first study to examine the effects of curcumin on cognition and mood and cognitive decline in a healthy older population
I’ll go a step further. I’m a multiple myeloma survivor who has healed his chemobrain and I stand a good chance of holding off dementia too! Scroll down the page to read about exercise, brain training, and nutritional supplementations as effective chemobrain therapies. Chemobrain therapies that might hold off dementia as well as strengthen my heart.
I’ve been taking curcumin for over 10 years. I first learned about curcumin for its ability to kill my cancer multiple myeloma. I’ve since learned of curcumin’s ability to treat inflammation, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteo arthritis, diabetes, depression, anxiety, cognitive decline, chronic anterior uveitis and other conditions.
The study linked and excerpted below explains the idea that you don’t have to be diagnosed with a chronic disease to benefit from curcumin.
I use Life Extension Super BioCurcumin. LE’s formulation has been shown to greatly enhance the body’s ability to absorb curcumin. I recommend it.
For more information about the many evidence-based non-toxic therapies shown to reduce cognitive decline or early Alzheimer’s disease, scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I will reply ASAP.
Thank you,
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
Recommended Reading:
- Anti-Myeloma benefits of Frequent, Moderate Exercise
- Choline, Non-Toxic Therapies to Fight Alzheimer’s
Investigation of the effects of solid lipid curcumin on cognition and mood in a healthy older population
“Curcumin possesses many properties which may prevent or ameliorate pathological processes underlying age-related cognitive decline, dementia or mood disorders…
One hour after administration curcumin significantly improved performance on sustained attention and working memory tasks, compared with placebo. Working memory and mood (general fatigue and change in state calmness, contentedness and fatigue induced by psychological stress) were significantly better following chronic treatment…
Curcumin was associated with significantly reduced total and LDL cholesterol and had no effect on hematological safety measures. To our knowledge this is the first study to examine the effects of curcumin on cognition and mood in a healthy older population or to examine any acute behavioral effects in humans.”
Atrial Fibrillation Increases Risk of Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment
Our findings underscore the importance of considering cognitive function in the management of patients with Atrial Fibrillation and the urgent need to develop evidence‐based strategies
Insult to injury. Not only did chemotherapy cause my atrial fibrillation (AF) but the study linked and excerpted below says that I have an increased risk of dementia and MCI.
You know what I say to that? Nonsense. Just because I have an increased risk of cognitive impairment doesn’t mean that dementia is in my future.
The study concludes by saying:
“Our findings underscore the importance of considering cognitive function in the management of patients with AF and the urgent need to develop evidence‐based strategies aimed to prevent cognitive decline and improve cognitive outcomes among this patient population.”
I already do consider cognitive functioning and I know of evidence-based strategies to prevent cognitive decline. By any metric I have improved my cognitive outcome over the past dozen years.
However my “evidence-based strategies” are non-toxic and non-conventional. Nutrition, supplementation, frequent but moderate exercise, brain games are only a few of the evidence-based strategies that I use daily/weekly to prevent cognitive decline.
Recommended Reading:
- Dementia Patients Prescribed Dangerous Drugs
- C-B-D, Inflammation and Alzheimer’s
- Chemobrain Coping- my list of 8 after 25 years-
Correlates of Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Neurocognitive Study (ARIC‐NCS)
“Background -Atrial fibrillation (AF) has been associated with faster cognitive decline and increased dementia risk…
In conclusion, we corroborated the association of AF with higher prevalence of MCI and dementia, found that elderly patients with AF
- experience a high burden of MCI and dementia,
- and identified correlates of MCI/dementia in this population.
Our findings underscore the importance of considering cognitive function in the management of patients with AF and the urgent need to develop evidence‐based strategies aimed to prevent cognitive decline and improve cognitive outcomes among this patient population.
Exercise Enhances Brain Training
“These enhancements in memory were most striking among the volunteers whose fitness had also improved the most, especially if they also practiced brain training.”
Brain health and therefore brain training, according to the article linked below, is the key to the second half of my life. I say this because I was diagnosed with post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment aka chemobrain a few years after I finished conventional therapies for my cancer diagnosis in 1994. I was diagnosed with chemobrain in my mid-40s, about 10 years ago and I have been working on enhancing my brain health ever since.
I’ve noticed many similarities between my own chemobrain symptoms and my mom’s dementia. Mom moved into assisted living a couple of years ago. She turned 90 last month. My view of my mom’s brain health is that she lives with basic age-related dementia.
I began this blog post by pronoucing that my brain health was the key to my life because I see my mom’s brain health as the key to her own happiness.
I don’t mean to overstate my point. Certainly a person’s physical abilities, heart, bladder, vision, etc. are important too. I’m saying that I have learned and practice therapies that have improved my own brain health and of the many health challenges that have resulted from my conventional cancer therapies in ’94-’97, I think maintaining my brain health is the most realistic, the most probable. Especially when the NYT printed the story linked and excerpted below.
I should point out several things about the article below.
The article aludes to moderate exercise possibly being as or more effective than vigorous exercise. I exercise frequently but moderately.
The article talks about brain training in general terms. I use and recommend BrainHQ from Posit Science. Inexpensive games downloaded to my inbox daily. Brain games focusing on everything from to-do lists to facial recognition to directions. It seems that my brain needs a variety of diffent exercises. Further, I need the daily prompt of the brain games coming to me, not to the brain games. I can be lazy when it comes to exercising my brain. I believe that I/we need to do both brain and physical training daily.
Lastly, I take several nutritional supplements daily that I believe are also essential to my brain health. I have blogged about choline, curcumin, green tea extract, etc. previously on PeopleBeatingCancer.
If physical exercise enhances brain training, then maybe nutritional supplementation enhances both physical exercise and brain training?
Recommended Reading
- Anti-Cancer benefits of Frequent, Moderate Exercise
- C-B-D, Inflammation and Alzheimer’s
- 7 superfoods to beat cancer and dementia
Exercise May Enhance the Effects of Brain Training
“Exercise broadly improves our memories and thinking skills, according to a wealth of science. The evidence supporting similar benefits from so-called brain training has been much iffier, however, with most people performing better only on the specific types of games or tasks practiced in the program.
But an interesting new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience suggests that combining intense exercise and brain training might, over time, amplify the benefits of both for the brain, even in people whose minds already are working well…
Past studies with animals show that exercise prompts the creation of many new brain cells in the hippocampus, presumably providing the raw materials — the blank canvas — onto which strong, new memories can be written and allowing for improvements in many types of memory after exercise.
Brain-training programs typically have had more limited effects. Research in people suggests that they often improve only the specific type of memory and thinking tested. So people who practice crossword puzzles may get better at completing crossword puzzles, but they may not get better at remembering where they last put their wallets.
Interestingly, however, some studies in animals have found that learning and thinking of any type, such as occurs during brain training, can improve the survival and functioning of young brain cells.
So scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, began to wonder recently whether brain training and exercise training might be complementary, with exercise prompting the creation of baby neurons that brain training would then strengthen.
To find out, the researchers decided to study a group of healthy, young college students, a group that would be expected to have robust and vigorous memories. If an experimental program resulted in better memories in these people, the scientists reasoned, it should also have implications for those of us whose aging memories might be starting to stutter and fade…
Then they randomly sorted them into three groups. One, as a control, was asked to continue with their normal lives.
Another began exercising, reporting to the university’s physiology lab three times a week for 20 minutes of supervised, high-intensity interval training on stationary bicycles. The researchers chose intense intervals because they provide a “strong physical stimulus” which should rapidly raise the fitness of the young people, says Jennifer Heisz, an assistant professor at McMaster University who led the study.
The third group undertook the same cycling program but with the addition of 20 minutes of computerized brain training before or after the workouts. This particular mental training consisted of memorizing faces that were similar to one another and then matching the correct faces as they appeared randomly on a computer screen. This program should improve the ability to dial in the details of the human face, an important but narrow type of memory.
The groups continued their assigned program for six weeks, and then repeated their original tests of fitness and memory.
In general, the young people who had exercised, whether they also brain trained or not, were then more physically fit than those in the control group. They also, for the most part, performed better on memory tests. And those improvements spanned different types of memory, including the ability to rapidly differentiate among pictures of objects that looked similar, a skill not practiced in the brain-training group.
These enhancements in memory were most striking among the volunteers whose fitness had also improved the most, especially if they also practiced brain training.
In effect, more fitness resulted in stronger memories, Dr. Heisz says, with the brain training adding to that effect, even for a type of memory that was not part of the training.
But the gains were not universal, the researchers found. Some of the young people in both exercise groups barely added to their aerobic fitness and also had the skimpiest improvements in memory.
For them, Dr. Heisz and her colleagues suspect, the interval training was probably too intense a form of exercise and may have caused their bodies to produce large amounts of stress hormones, which then affected how well their bodies and brains responded to the activity.
“It’s possible that they would have developed a better response with different and perhaps more-moderate exercise,” she says.
She and her colleagues plan soon to study the effects of various types and amounts of exercise and brain training on memory, including in people who are older. They also hope to follow people for longer periods of time to see whether the brain benefits linger, grow or stall.
But for now, the study’s findings suggest that exercising both our bodies and minds may provide the greatest boost to our memories, she says…”