Treatment Protocol Copyright © 2018 Kostoff Et Al
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Prevention and reversal of Alzheimer's disease: treatment protocol Copyright © 2018 Kostoff et al PREVENTION AND REVERSAL OF ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE: TREATMENT PROTOCOL by Ronald N. Kostoffa, Alan L. Porterb, Henry. A. Buchtelc (a) Research Affiliate, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA (b) Professor Emeritus, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA (c) Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, USA KEYWORDS Alzheimer's Disease; Dementia; Text Mining; Literature-Based Discovery; Information Technology; Treatments Prevention and reversal of Alzheimer's disease: treatment protocol Copyright © 2018 Kostoff et al CITATION TO MONOGRAPH Kostoff RN, Porter AL, Buchtel HA. Prevention and reversal of Alzheimer's disease: treatment protocol. Georgia Institute of Technology. 2018. PDF. https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/59311 COPYRIGHT AND CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE COPYRIGHT Copyright © 2018 by Ronald N. Kostoff, Alan L. Porter, Henry A. Buchtel Printed in the United States of America; First Printing, 2018 CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE This work can be copied and redistributed in any medium or format provided that credit is given to the original author. For more details on the CC BY license, see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>. DISCLAIMERS The views in this monograph are solely those of the authors, and do not represent the views of the Georgia Institute of Technology or the University of Michigan. This monograph is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in matters relating to his/her health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention. Any information in the monograph that the reader chooses to implement should be done under the strict guidance and supervision of a licensed health care practitioner. Prevention and reversal of Alzheimer's disease: treatment protocol Copyright © 2018 Kostoff et al ABSTRACT This monograph presents a five-step treatment protocol to prevent and reverse Alzheimer's Disease (AD), based on the following systemic medical principle: at the present time, removal of cause is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, condition for restorative treatment to be effective. Implementation of the five-step AD treatment protocol is as follows: FIVE-STEP TREATMENT PROTOCOL TO PREVENT AND REVERSE AD Step 1: Obtain a detailed medical and habit/exposure history from the patient. Step 2: Administer written and clinical performance and behavioral tests to assess the severity of the higher-level symptoms and degradation of executive functions Step 3: Administer laboratory tests (blood, urine, imaging, etc) Step 4: Eliminate ongoing AD contributing factors Step 5: Implement AD treatments This individually-tailored AD treatment protocol can be implemented with the data available in the biomedical literature presently. Additionally, while the methodology developed for this study was applied to comprehensive identification of diagnostics, contributing factors, and treatments for AD, it is general and applicable to any chronic disease that, like AD, has an associated substantial research literature. Thus, the protocol and methodology we have developed to prevent or reverse AD can be used to prevent or reverse any chronic disease (with the possible exceptions of individuals with strong genetic predispositions to the disease in question or who have suffered irreversible damage from the disease). Prevention and reversal of Alzheimer's disease: treatment protocol Copyright © 2018 Kostoff et al PREFACE Why did we write this monograph, what are its contents, what is new, who is the intended audience, and how will readers benefit from it? Motivation Non-communicable diseases have overtaken communicable diseases as the leading cause of global mortality. The impacts of non-communicable disease expansion on healthcare and associated costs have been dramatic. In the USA, these costs, and how to deal with them, have become a central political issue. The mainstream medical approach emphasizes treatments over prevention for non-communicable diseases. Given the expansion of non-communicable diseases, the present treatment-dominant approach is insufficient. More balance between treatment and prevention is required. Eliminating the actionable foundational causes of these diseases is at least as important as applying new treatments, if there is to be any hope for full or partial reversal of non-communicable diseases. Toward that end, the first author developed a systemic medical principle that would form the bedrock of a healing protocol for diseases: At the present time, removal of cause is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, condition for restorative treatment to be effective (where "removal" encompasses "neutralization" in those cases where actual "removal" is not possible, and "restoration" encompasses restoration of health to the organ/tissue as well as restoration of function). To prevent disease, the actionable foundational causes that underlie the disease symptoms need to be identified and removed as comprehensively, thoroughly, and rapidly as possible. To reverse disease (if irreversible damage has not been done and genetic predisposition to the disease in question is not a dominant factor), the preventive steps above need to be implemented as well. If the preventive protocols alone are inadequate for reversing disease progression, they need to be augmented by treatments. The first step in either disease prevention or reversal is to identify the full spectrum of potential foundational causes/contributing factors for the disease(s) of interest. In April 2017, we published a monograph entitled Prevention and Reversal of Alzheimer's Disease, which focused on identifying and eliminating the foundational causes of AD. The approach and findings of the April 2017 monograph were based on two observations: 1) much of the information required to identify and eliminate these foundational causes of disease is in the biomedical literature already, but is not being extracted and exploited adequately; 2) the biomedical literatures for diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD) are large, and extracting these AD foundational causes comprehensively from the literatures is a complex text mining problem. A number of readers of the April 2017 monograph suggested that a similar analysis focused on identifying AD treatments would be valuable. Since the two observations on AD foundational causes in the previous paragraph are equally applicable to AD treatments, we decided to extend our approach to the identification of AD treatments. The present monograph identifies a wide spectrum of AD treatments and Prevention and reversal of Alzheimer's disease: treatment protocol Copyright © 2018 Kostoff et al the AD characteristics they impact, and integrates the identified AD treatments, characteristics, and causes to generate an individually-tailored treatment protocol. Contents The overall theme of the April 2017 monograph and the present monograph is preventing and reversing AD based on the systemic medical principle described above. The specific focus of the present monograph is identifying, categorizing, and analyzing the existing and potential AD treatments. This would complement the elimination of the foundational causes of AD on the path to AD reversal. Identification of these AD treatments is based on analysis of many thousands of biomedical journal articles from the premier biomedical literature. Moreover, identifying both AD causes and treatments, in concert with identifying their impacts on specific AD 'characteristics' (measurable quantities such as biomarkers, behaviors, performance, etc), allows AD treatment protocols to be tailored to each person's unique condition. This monograph presents the comprehensive AD treatment protocol we have developed, and provides illustrative examples of how the AD treatment protocol would be implemented. There is a lengthy section in the present monograph describing the text mining/information technology advances that allowed the existing and potential AD treatments to be extracted efficiently from the large numbers of journal articles retrieved from the premier biomedical literature, and the impacts of these treatments and causes to be extracted from the literature. Major advances were made in the text mining approach for extracting both existing and potential treatments from the biomedical literature (and their impacts), and these advances could be applied to identifying existing and potential foundational causes for any disease from the literature as well. Novelty While the individual existing and potential AD treatments identified in this monograph are "known", in the sense that they exist scattered throughout the published literature (although the potential AD treatments have not been previously associated with AD in the literature), they have not been integrated to the extent they are integrated in this monograph. The new "insights" in this monograph are: 1) the sheer number of existing and potential AD treatments; 2) the sheer number of potential combinations of AD treatments that have to be identified and researched (many of whose individual components have not yet been identified); 3) the sheer number of AD characteristics that can be used as diagnostics to identify causes