Taking Selegiline to Prevent Memory Loss
Selegiline can cause insomnia, so it should be taken in the morning as a single daily dose. The usual dose range is 5 to 15 mg daily, though it can be given up to 60 mg per day to healthy people without any major side effects. Selegiline’s action in inhibiting monoamine oxidase-B can make it toxic, but only in very high doses. Some physicians themselves use selegiline as an antiaging treatment. However, even among this group of people who can easily obtain medications, vitamin E is more popular. I have included selegiline as a second-level option in the Memory Program. Unlike vitamin E, selegiline is a prescription medication.
Vitamin E and Selegiline (Deprenyl)
My colleague Dr. Mary Sano headed a national consortium that compared four treatment conditions: vitamin E, selegiline (also called Deprenyl), vitamin E plus selegiline, and placebo to treat three hundred outpatients with early to midstage Alzheimer’s disease. They found that both vitamin E 2,000 IUs daily (a high dose) and selegiline helped delay functional deterioration or nursing home placement by six months to a year. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997. Vitamin E alone, selegiline alone, and the combination of vitamin E and selegiline each delayed functional decline more than placebo. It was as if the antioxidant effect was “maxed out” by either
compound, and hence adding them together did not improve matters any further.
Vitamin A
Vitamin A is essential for normal functioning of the retina, and its deficiency causes night blindness, which used to be fairly common until the latter half of the twentieth century. Beta-carotene is converted by the body’s natural enzymes into vitamin A, and eating beta-carotene-rich foods like carrots prevents vitamin A deficiency. Both beta-carotene and vitamin A are antioxidants and freeradical scavengers, and many people take them regularly as antiaging medications. However, unlike vitamin E, vitamin A has not yet been tested against Alzheimer’s disease or milder forms of memory loss.
Vitamin A: Doses and Side Effects
If you take vitamin A, your daily supplementation dose should be 10,000 to 50,000 units daily. Another option is to take 10,000 to 25,000 units of vitamin A together with 15 mg of beta-carotene daily. Vitamin A is fat soluble, meaning that if ingested in excess it cannot easily be flushed out by the kidneys like water-soluble vitamins (B complex and C), and it requires liver enzymes to detoxify the extra amount. Luckily, side effects occur only above 200,000 units daily, so the recommended
therapeutic doses are safe.
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
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