our story

My Dad, Dr. David E. Crandall (pictured above) is the focal point of this (our) story.  He was a great father, a doting grandfather, an amazing dentist and a passionate horseman who, at the end of his life added one of the most important contributions to science: he successfully protected his brain from being destroyed by Alzheimer's!

By sparing his brain from being destroyed, Dad was able to repeatedly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's.  

He accomplished this through drug interventions he asked his doctors to support. 

Drug protocols that went against their medical protocols.

He'd derived the drug protocols from numerous cutting edge scientists across the world that were researching Alzheimer's Disease.

These scientific mavericks that we'd been contacting were all studying the Infectious/Microbial Hypothesis of Alzheimer's Disease.  Which, believe it or not - was Alois Alzheimer's colleague's (Dr. Oskar Fischer) first thought as he was also trying to identify what was causing the "brain wasting" observed in Patient #1.  As Alois Alzheimer rose to fame, Karl Fischer and his theory fell to near obscurity.

That's until recently  -- when scientists began to realize that Alzheimer's is a disease of inflammation.  And as inflammation is our body's first response to infection - suddenly, the scientific world began to dust off Fischer's observation that the woman that we refer to as Patient #1 may have been losing her mind as a result --of previously loosing her teeth to chronic gum disease.  

As a dentist, Dad saw this same thing in his office day-in-and-day-out.  Patients would come in to the clinic with periodontal disease that they refused to treat. And as time went on ... Dad noticed a change in their cognition.  Slowly, these patients went from bad to worse and eventually stopped coming for their annual check-ups.  Some time later, he'd read their obituary - and the cause of death (when included): was either Dementia or Alzheimer's Disease.  So, when dad started seeing his own short-term memory begin to fail, he worried that he might have Alzheimer's Disease.  He began reading all he could about this fatal disease - and from what he was learning, the late onset form of dementia his patients had developed wasn't genetic (over 77% of people with AD don't have a family member with it).  No, from his over 40 years of observation at his dental clinic, Alzheimer's seemed more like a cause-and-effect problem.  The cause was the chronic gum infection - created by "bad" oral bacteria - that ate its way through the gum tissue, and into the blood stream, where it could travel to the brain and destroy more tissue (now neurons). In the mouth, the destroyed tissue resulted in tooth and bone loss.  In the brain, the destroyed tissue resulted in dementia.

But Dad didn't have active Periodontal Disease - at least not that we knew (it's painless and very frequently overlooked by even general dentists).  Is it possible had he at one time? He considerable dental work done in the early years - all of which are opportunities for bacteria to escape into the blood stream. And statistically, it was reasonable - as over 50% of the population over 30 have some gum disease and by the time you're 65 that percentage jumps to over 70%.  Moreover, as a dentist, he was exposed to "bad" oral bacterial daily - exposure that raised his risk exponentially. 

Still, Dad's pride caused him to reject that his infection had originated from his mouth (he was a dentist for goodness sake!)  He asked his doctors to  check everywhere else in his entire body to find the root cause of his infection. And every single test, every sample, every scan - was negative for infection.  

But his miraculous response to the drugs he was taking indicated that he had inflammation/infection somewhere.  If not in his body, then the only other place left was brain.  Most of the doctors scoffed at the idea ["you'd be dead if you had a bacterial infection in your brain"]. But a handful of brave medical pioneers that witnessed Dad go: 

• from wheel chair to walking
• from no memory to all memory
• from incontinent to continent

listened to our arguments and made the incredible choice to overrule the status quo by helping mastermind a drug therapy that could help if an infection had actually broken through the blood brain barrier.  It worked for awhile, but resistance forced drug changes, and changes...

Unfortunately, even the very best don't know enough about treating diseases of the brain.  And so my dad finally passed late 2019.  When he entered into hospice he communicated his wish to have his unique brain studied.  He told me that an autopsy would possibly help my family (if there is a genetic connection). He also thought his autopsy could help the other people that had the same thing he had: an outlier Dementia that looked like Alzheimer's but responded to drug protocols that, once perfected, could cure them. I was sure he was right.  Little did we know...

You can imagine my surprise then, when the University of Minnesota's amazing Neuropathology team confirmed that Dad had the most severe Alzheimer's pathology possible.  This much protein deposition had only been seen in patients that had progressed to a vegetative state.  This much protein deposition also came with severe volume loss - meaning over half of Dad's brain's neurons should have been destroyed. Yet, Dad's brain was fine.  The atrophy was considered "age appropriate." In fact, if there had not been any protein in Dad's brain, they would have surmised he died of a cardiac event - and not Alzheimer's Disease.  At first they thought he was an anomaly.  That's until they heard that he'd interrupted this disease's progression through drug interventions.  The drugs were why he was able to recognize his family all the way to the end, and how he was able to recall how far a drive it is to Mayo (he had just been referred there by one of his doctors) and accounted for why he was able to ask me where his car was parked 30 days before he passed - as even at that point he was still planning to drive again.

The University then asked to study what Dad and his doctors had done - what drugs he took, what worked and what didn't.  But after two years of applying unsuccessfully for grants, I realized that the world can't wait for the NIH (the government) to decide if, and when they will pay to support research into this second highest risk factor (gum disease - age is number one) being the possible cause of Alzheimer's.  

So I made the decision to quit my job and start a non-profit charity (The Curing Alzheimer's Disease Foundation) that could raise the money for the lab.  And the University, who has been amazing all along, named the lab: The Alzheimer's Legacy Lab - in honor of my dad, in honor of Dr. Fisher and in honor of all the amazing people who have fallen to this disease...

My number one goal as the President of The Curing Alzheimer's Disease Foundation is to actively participate in the process of finding a cure.  If we are right, and the Infectious Hypothesis is correct - the Cure is within our grasp.  And if for some reason our hunch is wrong and the Infectious Hypothesis is incorrect - then the scientific community can redirect all that funding to a different hypothesis.  We call this Win-Win.  

And we are so glad you are with us as we See Science Through.

Thank you.  Anna Shelander