Kerry Briggs had trouble keeping track of the supplements. To help, her husband, John Briggs, created a spreadsheet with rows for ashwagandha, Omega-3 and curcumin extract. There was ginseng, lion’s mane mushroom and the antioxidant liposomal glutathione, too.
Ms. Briggs, 64, had started taking the supplements last July, a daily regimen that grew to include 34 capsules and tablets along with two scoops of powder. When it became too much, Mr. Briggs began blending them into a shake, to which he added brown food coloring so it looked less like its natural “sickly” olive shade.
Ms. Briggs was taking them all because a doctor had told her that with enough supplements and lifestyle modifications, her Alzheimer’s symptoms could not only be slowed, but reversed.
It is an idea that has become the focus of television specials, popular podcasts and conferences; the sell behind mushroom supplements and self-help books.
But the suggestion that Alzheimer’s can be reversed through lifestyle adjustments has outraged doctors and scientists in the medical establishment, who have repeatedly said that there is little to no proof for such a claim, and expressed concern that the idea could harm a large group of vulnerable Americans.
Mr. Briggs had come across the idea after learning about Dale Bredesen, who had been performing a series of small and unconventional studies through which he claimed to have designed a set of guidelines to reverse Alzheimer’s symptoms.
“Very, very few people should ever get this,” Mr. Bredesen told an audience last July, referring to cognitive decline. His company has made bracelets with the phrase “Alzheimer’s Is Now Optional” on them. His pitch has gained a following. Mr. Bredesen’s 2017 book, “The End of Alzheimer’s,” has sold around 300,000 copies and became a New York Times best seller.
Many doctors encourage Alzheimer’s patients to modify their diets and exercise regimens in hopes of slowing the disease’s progress, said Dr. Bruce Miller, the director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco. “The question, though, of reversal is very different.”
“It’s one thing to say that you’re reversing an illness because someone says they feel better, and another to prove it,” Dr. Miller said. “We don’t have the proof.”
Mr. Bredesen, 72, was once also a top neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, but he has not had an active medical license for much of the past three decades and doesn’t see patients anymore. He became skeptical of the medical and pharmaceutical industries’ approach to treating Alzheimer’s and dedicated himself to an alternative method focused on food, supplements, lifestyle tweaks and detoxification treatments.
The central idea was that there was no “silver bullet” — no one pill or intervention — that could cure Alzheimer’s. Instead, Mr. Bredesen believed in firing a “silver buckshot” (a reference to the sprayed pellets that come out of shotgun shells) by modifying 36 factors simultaneously. His strict protocol could be personalized after extensive lab testing, but generally involved a low-carbohydrate diet, intermittent fasting, supplements and, at times, interventions such as hormone treatments and home mold remediation.
For the Briggses, who live in North Barrington, Ill., the adjustments did not come cheap: $1,000 a month for supplements, $450 per hour for a specialty doctor and other costs, which altogether added up to $25,000 over eight months.
But Ms. Briggs wanted to do something to help find a treatment for the disease, and Mr. Briggs wanted to help his wife.
An Unconventional Idea Causes Concern
More than seven million people in the United States — roughly 11 percent of those 65 and older — have Alzheimer’s, the world’s leading cause of dementia. Despite decades of research and the development of a few medications with modest benefits, a cure for the disease has remained elusive.
But a number of people close to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and aligned with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement have claimed that Mr. Bredesen’s research points to a solution. Calley Means, a top adviser to Mr. Kennedy, considers himself a fan. Mr. Means’s sister, Dr. Casey Means, who President Trump has picked for surgeon general, has called Mr. Bredesen “a medical hero” of hers. Dr. Mark Hyman, a longtime friend of Mr. Kennedy’s and a popular figure in the wellness world, said in an interview that Mr. Bredesen’s research “crystallized concepts” around how to reverse Alzheimer’s.
But physicians and researchers who study Alzheimer’s have expressed concern that even if lifestyle changes can help prevent the disease, Mr. Bredesen is selling an inflated claim.
The Alzheimer’s Association, which helped fund Mr. Bredesen’s earlier and more conventional research, sees his recent approach as insufficiently rigorous. His trials have suggested his protocol can improve cognition, but Maria Carrillo, the organization’s chief science officer, said they “fall short of what the research community” would consider convincing enough to suggest to patients, since they lack control groups and are small, with the number of participants ranging from 10 to 25.
Others have expressed similar unease. In 2020, Dr. Joanna Hellmuth, then a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, published an article in The Lancet Neurology pointing to a number of “red flags” within Mr. Bredesen’s studies, including “the substantial potential for a placebo effect.” Dr. Jason Karlawish, the co-director of Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said Mr. Bredesen’s research and recommendations don’t adhere to the standards of medicine. The Alzheimer Society of Canada has gone so far as to say Mr. Bredesen is offering “false hope.”
Mr. Bredesen maintains that the results of his program can be remarkable, though he acknowledges it’s less successful for people with more noticeable symptoms: “It amazes me how people fight back against something that’s actually helping,” Mr. Bredesen said.
He connected The New York Times with patients who said they had benefited from his recommendations. Sally Weinrich, 77, in South Carolina, said she used to forget her pocketbook or miss the school pickup window for her grandchildren, but now thinks more clearly. Darrin Kasteler, 55, in Utah, who had struggled to tie a necktie and to drive, said both had become easier.
To Mr. Bredesen’s supporters, the testimonials are evidence of promise. But what divides Mr. Bredesen from the medical establishment isn’t his emphasis on lifestyle adjustments; it is the boldness of his claims, his unconventional and strict treatment plan and the business he is building around both.
Yes to Hormone Therapy, No to Apples and Bananas
It was one of Ms. Briggs’s sisters, Jennifer Scheurer, who first noticed that something was off.
In 2021, while visiting Ms. Scheurer in Oregon, Ms. Briggs repeated the same story a few times in one day, and had trouble finding words and playing board games. Ms. Scheurer also found Ms. Briggs standing in her kitchen, seemingly lost. This was particularly odd; Ms. Briggs was an architect, and she had designed the kitchen herself.
Ms. Briggs underwent a series of tests, ending in a spinal tap, which showed evidence of Alzheimer’s. She was 61.
The news was devastating, but Ms. Briggs told her husband that she wanted to enroll in a clinical trial to help others. But none of the trials admitted her. She weighed too little and her disease was already too advanced.
Then a friend recommended “The End of Alzheimer’s.” Mr. Briggs read that book and a follow-up, “The First Survivors of Alzheimer’s.” Excited, he reached out to Mr. Bredesen’s company, Apollo Health, to see what could be done for his wife.
Mr. Bredesen had developed a paid plan called “Recode,” a portmanteau of the phrase “reversal of cognitive decline,” and a training program for health practitioners like medical doctors, chiropractors and naturopaths to learn to implement it. On the Apollo Health website, Mr. Bredesen’s program is advertised as the “only clinically proven program to reverse cognitive decline in early stage Alzheimer’s disease.”
In January 2024, Mr. Briggs paid an $810 fee to join Apollo Health, which gave Ms. Briggs access to a personalized plan and matched her with Dr. Daniel LaPerriere, a doctor in Louisville, Colo.
Dr. LaPerriere was one of more than 2,000 medical practitioners who had taken Mr. Bredesen’s course. Today, the course is online and costs $2,000; after completing it, practitioners become part of the Apollo Health network, which funnels patients to them.
The Briggses’ sessions with Dr. LaPerriere were not covered by insurance. But he had identified some areas for improvement after reviewing Ms. Briggs’s lab tests, so the Briggses went ahead. One of the findings was that Ms. Briggs had high levels of inflammation. To address that, Dr. LaPerriere directed her to add curcumin and fish oil to her supplement regimen.
On Dr. LaPerriere’s recommendation, the Briggses also began to eat a modified keto diet that was low in sugar and rich in plants, lean protein and healthy fats. The Briggses were not allowed most fruit — no apples, bananas, peaches or grapes (“all these things that we love,” Mr. Briggs said), though the couple made an exception for blueberries. To see if Ms. Briggs was in a metabolic state of ketosis, where fat is used for energy instead of carbohydrates, Mr. Briggs experimented with pricking her finger twice each day to test her blood.
In keeping with Mr. Bredesen’s general guidelines, Ms. Briggs began working with a therapist to manage stress, and tried the brain-training games the protocol recommended, though she struggled to play them. Dr. LaPerriere gave Mr. Briggs the unconventional instruction to collect dust samples at home in order to determine whether “toxic mold” was present (only trace amounts were) and ordered lab tests to see if Ms. Briggs was suffering from an inability to flush it from her organs (she wasn’t).
He also prescribed Ms. Briggs hormone-replacement therapy, in the hope of improving her cognition.
Ms. Briggs’s primary-care physician raised concerns about the risks, Mr. Briggs said, but she took the hormones anyway.
The Decision to Quit
Mr. Briggs understood that the protocol would be unlikely to restore Ms. Briggs to her former self. But he was determined to see it through for at least six months.
By last September, though, Mr. Briggs was struggling to notice many benefits. Ms. Briggs could no longer keep track of conversations with her therapist, who suggested they stop the sessions. The next month, Mr. Briggs began touring memory-care facilities for his wife. In February, after about eight months, they quit the protocol altogether.
Mr. Bredesen said that he rarely tells people not to try his program, even if the chance of helping is small, because of the possibility of improvement. But he considered Ms. Briggs’s experience “not representative” of the results he has achieved in trials, and said in retrospect that “you could kind of tell ahead of time” that she would not fare well.
Mr. Bredesen has urged prospective patients to start his program preventively or early in the disease’s progression. Helping patients already experiencing significant decline, like Ms. Briggs, is difficult, he and Dr. LaPerriere said.
“People are more incentivized to come in when they’re farther along,” Mr. Bredesen said. “And that’s a real dilemma, which is why we’re telling people, ‘Please do not wait because we can do so much more.’”
Still, he added, he wishes Ms. Briggs had not given up.
Mr. Bredesen acknowledges the limits of his ideas. He knows more research is needed, and said he was overseeing a randomized controlled trial of around 72 patients. And he said that he worried that the title of his own book, “The End of Alzheimer’s,” was too definitive — and blamed his publisher.
But Mr. Bredesen pointed to the scandals and disappointments in Alzheimer’s research as evidence that conventional neurology had not offered a better path, and said he believed it would be wrong to withhold his ideas until he had accumulated enough evidence to satisfy the medical establishment.
Today, many people see the medical and pharmaceutical industries as “driven by greed,” said Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, the director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. “They fail to see, however, that the ‘natural medicine’ movement also may be exploiting them.”
That can be true, he added, “even if the patient and the family wants to believe it, even if the practitioners who are doing this are true believers.”
“I totally agree with that,” Mr. Bredesen said in response. “I am concerned about the same thing.” He noted that much of the money does not go to his company, but acknowledged that the total cost of the protocol could be high.
Mr. Briggs doesn’t regret the money he spent. It reassures him that he tried everything. But the program had worn on them. In January, a few weeks before the Briggses decided it was time to stop the program, they had taken a road trip to see family and friends.
Along the way, the couple shared French fries, a breach of the protocol. It was a relief to watch his wife enjoy them, Mr. Briggs said, and he had a thought that stayed with him.
“I think with the time that I have left with her, I’d rather honestly do that,” he said, “than press on.”
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