He Solved a Medical Mystery and Finds the Key to Alzheimer’s Disease in a Simple Amino Acid

For more than a decade, big pharmaceutical companies have invested billions in Alzheimer’s drug trials, with no progress.

But what if there was a neuroprotective compound that delivered better results at an early stage than any pharmaceutical product developed, right on our plates?

That’s what Dr. Paul Cox may have discovered after solving the mystery of neurodegenerative diseases in Guam, where in the 1990s rates of ALS and Alzheimer’s-like symptoms were 120 percent higher than in the rest of the world.

Dr. Cox would eventually discover that cyanobacteria, the same life forms that produce green algae, produced a natural toxin called BMAA that was seeping into the island’s trees. The trees then produced seeds rich in toxins, seeds that were eaten by fruit bats, which in turn were hunted by locals for their protein.

BMAA was then poisoning the local population and causing, as Dr. Cox said, deaths from neurodegenerative diseases in “every family” he spoke to. In 2003, Cox told the world about it.

“When we realized cyanobacteria might be the culprit, it was like staring into the abyss because we realized you could be exposed anywhere,” Dr. Cox told CNN in a mini-documentary , who in no way said that cyanobacteria was the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, but that it was a “risk factor.”

Seeking to understand and quantify the toxicology of BMAA, Dr. Cox conducted a trial through his nonprofit, the Brain Chemistry Labs at the Institute for Ethnomedicine in Jackson. What he found was that when monkeys were given toxic BMAA and an amino acid called L-serine, the neurotoxic effect was reduced by 85%.

There’s nothing magical about L-serine: it’s one of many non-essential amino acids we consume in our diet. Amino acids collectively represent what is labeled on food products as “protein.”

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L-serine is found in eggs and meat, as well as edamame, tofu, seaweed, and sweet potatoes in smaller amounts.

Noting the dramatic protective effects that L-serine conferred on monkeys, Dr. Cox took the data to the FDA and set up clinical trials to study this simple amino acid as a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

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The final part of this interesting story is that Dr. Cox was not trained as a neurologist, but rather as an “ethnobotantist”: he studies how human cultures use plants for medicinal purposes. On the island of Okinawa, a “blue zone” famous for its longevity, Dr. Cox found that residents of the village of Ogimi consumed on average about 400 percent more L-serine than the average American.

This observational evidence combined with his laboratory data has given Dr. Cox immense confidence that his placebo-controlled trial of Alzheimer’s patients taking an L-serine supplement will produce the fruits, and that this simple food component could be the first commercially available. treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

WATCH a mini-doc on the subject from CNN…

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