Here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professionals,
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Here is a way for nurses administrators, social workers and other health care professionals to get an easyceu or two
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The Dementia Caregiver's Little Book of Hope [Kindle Edition]
Green Pharmacy (Dr. Jim Duke's Botanical Desk Reference)
Aricept® (generic: donepezil) treats Alzheimer's by blocking AChE. Rosemary does that naturally. Learn about rosemary's dementia-fighting benefits from USDA Dr. J. Duke. See how dietary rosemary strengthens memory.
"Rosemary contains more than a dozen antioxidants and a half-dozen compounds reported to prevent the breakdown of acetylcholine. It's fabulous that the classical herb of remembrance has so many compounds that might help people suffering from Alzheimer's."
These are the words of Dr. James Duke, former U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Chief of Medicinal Plant Research.
Dr. Duke is one of the world's leading authorities on medicinal plants. He helped build the USDA database that demonstrates how rosemary may slow the progress of Alzheimer's.
His strong advocacy of rosemary has to do with a chemical called acetylcholine. Anyone who has lived with Alzheimer's in the past decade has heard of the drug Aricept®, sold generically as donepezil. It is the #1 drug therapy for Alzheimer's.TechtalkThe brain depends on a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, or ACh for short. The brain keeps making fresh batches. In order to keep the brain from getting flooded with it, there is an "esterase" that breaks it down after use. Think of the esterase as the garbage truck, carting away extra acetylcholine. In Alzheimer's, there is a shortage of acetylcholine, so we want to inhibit (or block) the esterase (the garbage collector), so that more acetylcholine stays in the brain. To do that, a person needs to consume an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor, such as Aricept® or rosemary.
How Aricept® and Rosemary Help
Aricept® is a medicine that does one thing: it prevents the breakdown of acetylcholine.
So does rosemary.
Dr. Duke said that when he learned of the new medications that fought Alzheimer's by inhibiting the breakdown of acetylcholine, "I probed my U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) database for herbs with phytochemical constituents that were also reported to prevent the breakdown of ACh (acetylcholine).
"Even though I myself had been the source of the overwhelming proportion of the data in the database for more than a decade, I was surprised at the output. The database yielded about a half dozen anti-AChE (acetylcholine esterase) compounds, with Rosmarinus officinalis (rosemary) the proud winner in terms of their numbers and potencies."
Dr. Duke's Big Bet
Back in 1994, Dr. James Duke publicly bet his hair that rosemary shampoo would do as well as over-the-counter medication in helping the symptoms of Alzheimer's.Why?
"Because," he said, "aromatic phytochemicals are absorbed transdermally through the pores in the scalp just as elsewhere on hairy areas of the body, so it would be a very good bet indeed that some of the volatile aromatic phytochemicals in rosemary shampoo would make their way into the circulation and thence to the brain."
Probing the USDA phytochemical database once again on Labor Day 2007, he found that rosemary has now been reported to contain nearly a dozen aromatic compounds potentially active against AChE (acetylcholine esterase).
Dr. Duke shares more about that memory from three years ago. "On that same day I heard, at least thrice, a commercial broadcast on NBC telling listeners that Aricept®(donepezil HCl), the most heavily promoted of synthetic anti-Alzheimer's drugs, probably modifies a neurotransmitter involved in Alzheimer's. But Aricept® consists only of a single AChE inhibitor, and it's synthetic and unnatural; rosemary contains nearly a dozen!!"
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