Question About Alzheimers

I'm wondering if any of you can shed some light on something that has happend to my father. He had surgery on some herniated discs and bone spurs last week. he was recovering at my sisters and 2 days ago, he started seeing things, hearing things and generaly losing it. He believes my cousins live in her TV set...It's very bad. He is in the hospital where they are running tests. It keeps getting worse. They did a scan of his brain and said that it looks like the brain of someone who is lost to alzheimers. If they didn't know better they would assume that person was bedbound with full time alzheimers care. I can't understand this? Before the surgery he worked full time, drove..was totally normal! They thought he suffered a stroke, but can't find it...
I am beside myself over this. I have heard something about anesthesia doing this, but a week later? And why would he get worse?

Does anyone have any ideas? Things I should ask the doctor? I recently moved 800 miles away :( I'm trying to work it out to get back home asap.

Thanks for reading.

Ask if any part of his anesthesia included nitrous oxide. It can totally deplete a person of B12--which can lead to dementia, etc. If they won't answer you or say they don't know, ask for a B12 test. Anything below 550 can cause neurological symptoms, so don't let them tell you it's "normal" if it's not near that level. If they won't give him B12 shots, you can have him supplement with methylcobalamin type of B12 (used in the brain) at doses of at least 1000 mcg/day to see if that helps.

My mother-in-law was VERY out of it after her kidney surgery last winter, and she went into the hospital just fine, etc. She got much better by 2 weeks, though, especially after she got away from the heavy duty pain killers.

Good luck to you and your dad!

Wow, he just told me they gave him a B 12 shot last night.

Well, he wont do anything except exactly what the doctors say..

Today they said it is mostly narcotic related, but that he does have dementia :(

He is having a stress test now...

Man this is a scary story!

I hope things improve for him after he detoxes the damn narcotics.


I hope there is something that can be done. I know people are really stubborn at sticking inside the known box.

But, it seems so unlikely to me that someone would just suddenly get dementia - unless there is a stroke, infection, or brain trauma for some reason. (I have a little experience here with these things, so it's not totally conjecture.) This makes me wonder if the surgery team screwed up somewhere, and they're covering it up.

If it's a drug reaction, I know it's a stretch, but NAET and other therapies such as homeopathy can sometimes reverse the damage from drugs/vaccines/infections. It's just so hard to find anyone who knows the right things.

We've been on the dementia road with my mother for nine years now. It is a most difficult road and wears out the caretakers - or you hire caretakers, and that's expensive. I hope your family doesn't have to go there yet, and you can find something to help!


After I responded to your and then wrote a note about Lyme, I was thinking about my own spinal problems, and also the fact that my jaw always hurts, and right now I'm experiencing mouth infection and peridontal disease, and the tailbone and jaw are two ends to the same snake....

I wonder if your father got an infection in his spine from the surgery that has traveled up the nervous system to the brain? Not a nice thought. Maybe they need to look for an infection? Just a thought.


I'm really sorry for what is going on, and certainly don't know the why, but here is my experience:

My mother is 85 and has quite severe spinal damage - disc degeneration and spinal stenosis (spinal column squeezing on the spinal cord). She has nerve damage in and around the spine. The neurologist referred to this as "spinal dementia". I didn't know if he meant to say that, or it was a mistaken term. Anyway, he said that with her spinal nerve damage, it causes hallucinations. He said it is quite common with nerve damage. She has dementia, but it is not Alzheimers. When her pain level decreases, her cognition improves.

I don't know, but it makes me wonder if nerves were damaged during your father's surgery?

That wouldn't cause the brain to look like an Alzheimer brain, but I thought that you couldn't diagnose an Alzheimer brain in an alive person - only at autopsy. In fact, I recently read an article on Pubmed, where they actually exhumed a person months after he died to establish alzheimers. (Had to do with the will).

I may post separately some info about alzheimers I've been reading lately. Has to do with iron overload and aluminum. Very interesting. They were treating Alz by chelating IRON.

You might consider utilizing acupuncture. They might be able to help with cognition and nervous system or detox, if needed. My acupuncturist was treating both a post-stsroke patient and an M.S. patient. Small, but significant improvements.

Also, with my mother, I am trying two things I've read about lately. One is DMSO mixed with B vitamins applied transdermally. The other is a little known mineral called Gallium. Very interesting stuff - a little tricky. But, we've given my mom several brief topical gallium treatments, and she is calmer, less pain, and somewhat more cognitive.

Best wishes. Hope you are able to get there to your father, and I so hope he recovers.

I think she may have a very good reason for the problem. He may have had a reaction to some medication they gave him. Alzheimers doesn't appear overnight it takes time for it to develope.

I would ask for a second opinion on the brain scan. Ask what drugs they gave him that could produce those symptoms. Also ask about a fat emboli. Can happen after bone surgeries and it looks like a stroke.

Hope this helps alittle.


Something similar happened to my father after open heart surgery and to my cousin after a cancer surgery. In both cases they finally said it was a weird reaction from the anesthesia. It was a while back so I can't remember if they gave them anything or if it just had to wear off. With my dad, he kept seeing ambulances coming into his hospital room to get him and my cousin was really screwed up. Every time we would say anything to her she would say we had said it before and why did we keep saying it over and over. Believe me, we did not repeat things over and over. They may have given her an antidepressant, I'm not sure. I don't remember if they did brain scans or not. They might have for my cousin because she had had brain radiation a few years before.

Wow. So sorry to hear aout this... My mom has alzheimers and it is so painful to e away from her ut this event, eing so sudden, must e so hard to fathom.

I can't even believe that a traumatic event like anesthesia would cause the brain to look like a person with alzheimers "overnight". The only thing I can think of is that the anaesthesia did induce some psychotic state that is independent of what is going on with the rain...

But if they did a scan and that is the condition it is in, there are two things that come to mind to help:

1) gentle mercury detox with chlorella and something like PCA-Rx.. Metals never help and if you can start some chelation that is safe esp if he has mercury in the mouth, that would be good.

2) consider lyme disease and treatment like vitamin c and salt. (let me know if you need to know aout the later treatment. it is what dpd and i are on for our lyme disease)

Apparently lots of folks with alzheimers also have lyme and I am not that surprised. In fact I wonder if it was transmitted to my mom via fleas or mosquitoes which orginiated from me.

I wish I could tell you that my mom got all etter doing x, y and z ut she in fact wont let me give her many pills. So she is on a very low dose of c-salt (2 grams and her appetite did come ack with it which is wonderful ut ideally she would e on 6-8), turmeric, and olive leaf extract. I truly think she would e worse without these and do MUCH etter if she took higher doses.

I wish I could give you more advice ut my prayers will be with you and your dad.


My lyme doctor tells me that there is new research implicating the lyme cyst with alzheimers. He claims the cysts, formerly considered to be generally inactive, now indeed appear to be active and capable of basically "feasting" on neurons. He believes this new research is very compelling.

I went to the web after my last visit with him and found this below... I don't think it's the specific work he's referencing, as this work remains pure conjecture, but along the same lines...

Perhaps the surgery "activated" an existing infection... there is ample evidence this sort of thing happens all the time with lyme, particularly in the case of stress.

Note that discussing this possibility with doctors in the hospital will be worthless. You'd have to seek out lyme specialists, or try salt/c and see if the difinitive dieoff symptoms occur.

Peraps another infection is generating the toxins. Do your parents have cats? Toxoplasmosis can be transferred in cats and result in phychotic episodes. Usually though immune suppression of some sort is required and lyme is the a common co-culprit here as well.

I'd highly recommend taking HUGE amounts of charcoal and chlorella to see if toxins could be mopped up, lyme toxins or otherwise.

=======================

Plaques of Alzheimer's disease originate from cysts of Borrelia burgdorferi, the Lyme disease spirochete.


BTW, lyme causes systemic inflamation, which can be exacerbated by other things including allergic reactions. For instance, this is one reason we get brain fog. The lyme initiates vasculitis which can be worsened with exposure to allergins, with mold and other fungi allergies common here, along with food allergies, etc. The resulting antigen-atibody complexes accumulate on the vascular walls in lyme patients and induce the inflamation, which in turn can suppress blood flow and oxygen to the brain. If you look at the spect scans of lyme patients you find they almost always have impaired oxygen to the brain.

Here's the result of a quick google search for spect scans.

Back to the herniated discs. One of the most common symptoms for lyme patients is back trouble because the spirochets can cause inflamation along the spine. This can naturally lead to herniated discs. In '99 they diagnosed with the spondylolisis in L5 using a cat scan.

I know this lyme thing is sounding like a broken record, but the number of folks I've come across in the past 18 months who found bizarre illnesses were related to lyme is boggling. In TOO many of these cases family members are coming up positive as well. I met members of TWO familes who were ALL infected at my last doctors visit. This is stuff is running roughshot through the population and few people yet realize it.


That totally sucks! My sympathies. That is interesting tho about the brain scan. There must be more to alzheimers than what they are seeing on the scan - there is no WAY your dad could have gone from fine to this in a week!

The only thing I can think of is to ask them to check his parathyroid gland. My mom started to get loopy at age 67, and we really thought it was alzheimers. But, they removed her parathyroid gland and she went right back to normal and kept all her marbles until she died from heart attack at 84.

I am thinking, perhaps they inadvertantly inflicted trauma in that area when operating on the disc, esp. if the disc was in the neck area.

Of course, I have no medical background to back up the possibility of this happening, but it could not hurt to ask. Good luck!