About six months ago I gave up on the anti-oxidant approach as a treatment for her multi infarct dementia and begun treatment of the vascular dementia from a different angle.
However, the value of vitamin E and vitamin C as a preventative of vascular disease, including vascular dementia, is supported by research - but with the vascular dementia, you need to catch it in the early stages.
With her doctor's approval, we included into mum's dementia treatment protocol, 10mg of vinpocetine three times daily to maintain a lower blood pressure in the brain. Thereby reducing the risk of further vascular accidents, thereby slowing or stopping the vascular dementia - in theory. The drug also has several other advantages, including some equivalence to Vitamin E in antioxidant effect, known to improve eye sight a bit, hearing a bit, concentration a bit, can help with ringing in the ears... in short, vinpocetine seems good for treating vascular dementia. We also included fish oil into her multi-infarct vascular dementia treatment; begun using high dose fish oil three times a day to help maintain/improve neuron function (it also helps to relieve pain etc).
[ If mum's vascular dementia had been of the bleeder type, I would have tried out the vinpocetine under medical supervision, but the fish oil can aggravate bleeding conditions, so the fish oil would not have been included. I would have also checked with her doctor about the suitability of using certain herbal hemorrhoid tablet preparations designed to cure hemorrhoids and relieve pain, as the problem with having hemorrhoids is that the veins are weakened and the hemorrhoid preparations sometimes are made to strengthen the walls of blood vessels. ]
After making the adjustments to mum's multi-infarct vascular dementia treatment regime, clotting type, we begun seeing many improvements. She can now follow a person with her eyes and head, like our grand daughter, Hannah, on a Scooter. Mum is now able to sit upright in a wheel chair unsupported, is much more awake and is much more alert to things around her. Even the wheelchair taxi driver, who knows nothing about the vascular dementia treatment being used, has commented about how much better she seems to be doing with each trip. The vascular dementia, in essence, appeared to have been slowed dramatically, perhaps even stopped, allowing the brain time to reogranise it's neural pathways. We were looking at increasing her fish oil intake in the hope it will help alleviate the vascular dementia even further, but according to the American Heart Association, more than three grams of fish oil a day can cause excessive bleeding, so that idea went out the window. Even so, with multi-infarct vascular dementia in the very advanced stage, there is still room for hope when nearly everyone else has given up.
Well, mum came to visit on Christmas day, 2004 - 4 years after entering the dementia unit - courtesy of a wheel chair bus we arrranged. She had improved much more again. She tried to use her fingers to unwrap a present, she tried talking - for the most part unintelligible - and she tried to stand. She was very much alert and awake the whole 90 minutes. These improvements are just mind grabbing and I recall becoming teary thinking maybe we had finally stopped the onslaught of the vascular dementia.
Well, about five or six more months has now gone by, mum is still responsive to us, looks at me when I talk and smiles when I tell she is looking good. Her body, though, may be getting a bit stiffer, but that might be arthritis and cold weather, or, regrettably, the dementia.
http://www.alzheimersdementia.cdadc.com/vasculardementia.html
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