Kat Toups

Brain in the Lost-and-Found: Reversing My Dementia
and Successful Precision Medicine Clinical Trials

I’ve been a Board-Certified Adult and Geriatric Psychiatrist since the early 1990s and I now practice Functional Medicine Psychiatry (since 2011).

After leaving academics, I ran a Clinical Trials Research Center for 13 years, where I served as the Principal Investigator on over 100 pharmaceutical trials, including more than 20 long-term studies with medications for Alzheimer’s and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). With each new medication and each new mechanism of action,

I was hopeful that we would be able to help people get well.

But I came to realize that while some medications relieved some symptoms of suffering, we were not helping people to truly get well. My patients suffering from dementia and cognitive decline were certainly not getting well.

Then, at age 50 in 2009, I gradually came to realize that I was becoming as cognitively impaired as the patients in my Alzheimer’s clinical trials!

The cognitive decline began with word-finding difficulty and word-substitutions. It progressed to the point that I could no longer remember how to do things on a computer. I would ask my husband to show me how to do things I used to be able to do, and he would get annoyed because I was asking him the same things over and over. (I couldn’t remember that I had just asked him!)

I had trouble with driving as my visuospatial skills deteriorated. I could no longer back up or parallel park, as my brain was unable to sequence those complex tasks.

To make a phone call, I could no longer hold the numbers in my head, and it sometimes took me multiple tries.

I developed auditory processing problems, meaning my brain could no longer decode what was being said. I kept going to my ENT doctor and asking for hearing aids. He told me I only had a mild hearing loss and did not need hearing aids. But this problem got so bad that one night, I could not understand any of the conversation of my friends talking in a restaurant. This was absolutely terrifying! I could only understand a snatch of every word — not enough to understand what was being said.

When I went back to the ENT for the hearing aids, he looked at me funny and told me the problem was not in my ears — it was in my brain!

I had to shut down my research center. So, I arranged to transfer my ongoing trials to another research center in the area. I was also having some major allergic and immune issues, and I thought I could take a few months off and get better.

That ended up being an intense 3-year journey of getting well.

At that time, no one was thinking about dementia in a 50-year-old. But I had treated a few patients in their 50s with dementia, and I knew it progressed much more rapidly in the younger age group.

The physicians and specialists I saw knew something was wrong with me, but as one kind allergist said to me, “What you have is not in the textbooks yet!”

While I tried to figure out how to help myself, I went to a medical conference called “Food as Medicine,” as I had become allergic to everything. I was covered with rashes and hives. I thought I ate healthy, but the Food As Medicine conference really opened my eyes, and there I learned about functional medicine, or root-cause resolution medicine.

The next training module at the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) was the Allergy and Immune module, and I quickly realized that functional medicine, which addresses all of the underlying root causes of illness, was perhaps a way to start helping myself since traditional medicine had nothing to offer me for an illness that was “not in the textbooks.”

At that time, I felt I had a sieve for a brain, and learning new things was very difficult. But I started study groups with other physicians in the San Francisco Bay Area who were also learning functional medicine, and over a period of three years, I was able to attend all of the training modules at IFM.

Well, I needed each of those modules to address all of the many underlying factors that were causing my brain to degenerate. I learned and applied each module to myself and I slowly started to improve. As I healed all of the physical problems, my brain started to heal as well.

There finally came a time when I could hold all seven numbers in my head to dial a phone number again and I realized my brain had come back online.

My dementia experience and training at the Institute for Functional Medicine changed my entire view of psychiatry and medicine. These gave me an expanded toolkit to approach the psychiatric and cognitive problems of my patients with a goal of getting people well, rather than just prescribing medications as band-aids.

As I’ve worked with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia for the past 35 years and successfully reversed my own cognitive decline, it was natural to expand my functional medicine background and start using it to help others interested in reversing their dementia.

This led me to collaborate with Dr. Dale Bredesen, and I have had the honor to serve as the Principal Investigator with him on two clinical trials using precision medicine/functional medicine to reverse Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Dementia. Our current randomized trial is still in progress, but in our first trial, 84% of the study patients had improvement, including in their MRI head scans.

I am passionate about both the research and the teaching I do, with the goal of helping people to understand that Dementia is not a death sentence!
Neurodegeneration happens for reasons, and when we can find and address all the underlying reasons, as well as employ neuroplasticity techniques, the brain can heal if people begin before it’s too late.

I’m currently working on a book, Dementia Demystified, to help people understand what to test and what to do when they begin experiencing cognitive decline. In the meantime, I have a free 22-page eBook on my website that covers a lot of the basics of the approach we use and discusses many of the underlying contributors to dementia.

I’ve been able to help dozens of my patients reverse their dementia and look forward to having many of them share their success stories here with the Alzheimer’s Survivor’s Foundation to serve as a beacon of hope for others.