Savannah clinic treats dementia, Alzheimer’s with metabolic approach

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Dr. Allen Meglin, owner and specialist at the Advanced Regenerative Medicine Clinic in Savannah, said the clinic uses a certified program to treat dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by targeting metabolic problems in the brain.

Meglin said the clinic is Recode II certified, a program developed by Dale Bredesen and others.

Alzheimer’s as metabolic decline

Meglin said Alzheimer’s disease reflects 10 to 30 years of suboptimal metabolic performance in the brain before symptoms appear.

“Alzheimer’s is kind of an end-stage brain failure,” Meglin said. “By the time you start to demonstrate symptoms of Alzheimer’s, you’ve had the disease for between 10 and 30 years.”

Meglin said the brain compensates for damage through redundancy, delaying visible symptoms while metabolic problems accumulate.

He said tau and beta amyloid theories of Alzheimer’s “just really don’t apply,” and that metabolic problems occur upstream of both tau and beta amyloid. Meglin said addressing those metabolic problems improves brain performance.

Treatment approach

Meglin said the Recode program focuses on diet, exercise, sleep, stress reduction, community involvement, and supplements and vitamins to optimize brain function. He said the program has about a 75% success rate in stabilizing or reversing dementia.

The clinic adds hyperbaric treatment, red light therapy, hormone optimization and peptides, which Meglin said raises the success rate to between 90% and 95%.

Meglin said patients who improve often do not initially recognize they had dementia.

“They don’t know they have dementia and then you treat them and they get better,” Meglin said. “And then they understand that they have dementia and they look backwards and say, thank God we did this. This is so great.”

Patient examples

Meglin said the clinic has treated patients who were institutionalized with dementia and were later able to leave those facilities.

He described one patient who was in 24-7 care and was brought to the clinic three times a week for treatment. Meglin said that after about six months, she was able to travel to Europe on her own with a supervised tour and without a caretaker.

“I got my life back,” Meglin said the patient told him.

Meglin said another patient in a managed care facility began asking for her car back and to move home after several months of treatment. He said she had not recognized her own children before treatment and later began saying things like, “I want to travel. I want my car back. I want to move back home. Get me out of here.”

Meglin said the gains from treatment are not permanent. He compared the effect to exercise, saying that if a patient stops receiving treatment, including hyperbarics, the reversal of dementia will not be sustained.

Metabolic holes explained

Meglin said the APOE4 gene, often called the Alzheimer’s gene, does not code for Alzheimer’s disease itself. He said the gene codes for fat transport in the brain, similar to how HDL and LDL transport cholesterol in the body.

Meglin said he has one copy of APOE4, putting him at about a 25% risk of developing Alzheimer’s. He said two copies of the gene raise the risk to about 50%.

He said defective fat transport in the brain is one example of a “metabolic hole,” a metabolic process that is not functioning well.

Meglin also cited insulin insensitivity in the brain as another example. He said the brain does not need insulin to move glucose into cells, unlike muscles or the liver, but does use insulin as a growth factor to build new synapses. He said this is why some now refer to Alzheimer’s as “type 3 diabetes.”

Meglin said combining multiple metabolic holes, each only partially impaired, produces brain failure. He compared it to a car with several slightly defective gears that can still run individually but fails when enough are combined.