Coconut Oil for Alheimer's Disease

[Mark Thorson]

There's a new putative treatment for Alzheimer's Disease.
Here's an essay about it from one of the more prominent
promoters of it:

http://www.coconutketones.com/whatifcure.pdf

Lots of sites tout coconut oil for various diseases, mostly
trying to sell coconut oil. The site by Mary Newport only
sells her book, not any coconut oil products. Her site
only covers one application for which there seems to be a
plausible mechanism. That proposed mechanism is insulin
resistance in the brain deprives brain neurons of the energy
they need, this energy deficit causes the symptoms and
pathology of AD, and ketone bodies from medium-chain
triglycerides in coconut oil can provide a bypass around
the insulin resistance to supply this energy.

As near as I can tell, some parts of this hypothesis seem
to be true. There is insulin resistance in the AD brain,
MCTs reduce amyloid beta oligomer accumulation in a mouse
model of AD, and MCTs do raise levels of ketone bodies that
can be utilized for energy in the brain. One study did not
observe improved cognitive performance in mice, while another
found slight improvement. One study in humans found modest
improvement in cognitive performance in humans lacking the
APOE4 allele, but not in subjects with the APOE4 allele
(allele linked to early onset AD). This latter result seems
odd -- only the group with the allele for early onset AD
was not helped.

This recent article pooh-poohs the notion of treating AD
with coconut oil:

http://sph-publications.berkeley.edu/bho/2012/05/coconut-oil-wellness-letter/

Oddly, the article says that coconut oil does not affect
blood cholesterol. Newport says something similar, saying
that it is old reports that used partially hydrogenated
coconut oil which claimed that. These assertions are
contradicted by at least one recent study which used
non-hydrogenated coconut oil -- it raises cholesterol
to a greater degree than beef fat or lard, which is
unsurprising because it is more saturated than either one.

This article is largely positive, with caveats:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2258665

Note the large variation in dosage. Newport is giving
her husband 11 tablespoons a day. That's a huge amount,
probably well over half of his calories. Parmar is
giving his dad only two teaspoons a day. There are three
teaspoons in a tablespoon, so that's about 16 times less
than what Newport is doing.

This is an early study of the ketogenic diet in a mouse
model of AD which found reduced amyloid beta accumulation
but no behavioral effects:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1282589/pdf/1743-7075-2-28.pdf

This is a recent study, again in mice, which found
significant reduction in amyloid beta accumulation and
tau hyperphosphorylation, but only subtle improvements
in learning and memory from a ketone ester diet:

http://www.coconutketones.com/pdfs/Kashiwaya_Y_NeurobiolofAging_2012.pdf

This is an early study of MCTs in AD in humans (all
that crud in the link appears to be necessary to
download the PDF):

http://www.google.com/url?q=http://w.numedica.net/literature/Reger%25202004.pdf&sa=U&ei=PHb4UNeNPOfTiwLQi4DACA&ved=0CBcQFjAB&usg=AFQjCNEs6EuSyuO-TjKptKGvdkgnSKf-uA