Hi Dawn, sorry to hear about your dad.

In another thread with Bex, we were talking about her smoking and I brought up some facts about it and its relation to ApoE4 allele, glutathione, mercury neuro-toxicity and early onset Alzheimer's (most common among ApoE4 carriers).

Basically, the people with ApoE4 variant of the gene (which increases in frequency from south to north Europe) have a very sluggish natural mercury detox from the brain. People with ApoE3 (more common in southern and central Europe) and ApoE2 (smaller groups around the world, rare in Europe) gene variants have increasingly more efficient Hg brain detox. I didn't bother getting ApoE test, but based on the fact that 97 percent in the European region of my ancestors have ApoE3, and observing my fairly good tolerance to mercury (unfortunately, I just had too many amalgams, 17, for about 20 years, which is too much mercury for any ApoE type to keep up with on its own), I think it is almost certain (94%) that I have E3+E3 combination.

In your case, though, with family history of early AD and sensitivity to mercury toxicity, depending on where your ancestors came from, you might wish to get your the ApoE polymorphism typed exactly. If it is double ApoE4 (from father & mother), you definitely would want to explore possible ways for more drastic preemptive action.

As far as I know, the only medicine which was shown to drastically reduce odds of early onset Alzheimer's, by a factor of 10, is the ancient medicinal plant, tobacco (also, for people who quit, the risk grows 50% for each 10 years since quitting, see the last paper cited above). If it is not too intrusive question, what was your dad's smoking history? If he smoked, did he quit at some point? In the mentioned Dutch study, in the families with early onset AD, the smoking members with ApoE4 had 10 time lower rates of AD than the non-smoking members with ApoE4.

While there is no official theory as to why does tobacco smoking work (tobacco is extremely complex plant regarding its psychoactive effects; science has barely scratched the surface of its magic), it is known that nicotine isn't how it works (the patches help a bit but not nearly as much as the actual tobacco). My guess is that it is at least in part because of significant stimulation of glutathione production (80% greater baseline levels among smokers). The additional support for this mechanism comes from the fact that smoking also reduces the odds of late onset Alzheimers (by half) and by the same factor two, the odds of Parkinson's. It also reduces risk by factor 2 of developing schizophrenia and among patients it greatly allevites the schizophrenia symptoms (virtually all schizophrenics are heavy smokers). These are all diseases which happen to share symptoms with mercury neuro-toxicity and glutathione is the main internal enzyme for natural mercury chelation. Hence one would expect tobacco smoke to have therapeutic and protective effects in all three diseases, and that is indeed the case.

You should read the thread with Bex on smoking should you decide to test the effects of tobacco, but as noted there, before trusting anyone's theory, trust the signals from your own body. It will know the best whether that will work for you. The additional info there is merely to reassure you that there is a quite a bit more about it than what the simple-minded mass media is peddling about tobacco and its effects. The chief tobacco-related harm is not from the ancient medicine itself but from the negative placebo, or witch doctor effect induced by our present anti-smoking zeitgeist. Hence, if it works for the stuff that matters to you, to get the mercury out of your brain and protect you against early onset AD, you can without fear ignore all the anti-smoking propaganda (which is a profit driven BS), since that brainwashing, with the resulting negative placebo, is the only harm one needs to worry about.