The Surprising Relationship Between Glucosamine & Alzheimer’s

Glucosamine is popularly taken for joint health, and it really is the best thing out there for that.

No wait, it’s not: Cucumber Extract Beats Glucosamine & Chondroitin… At 1/135th Of The Dose?!

Today, we’re not doing glucosamine’s PR any favors, but well, we’re a health science publication and the truth is there may be a problem:

Glucosamine, hyperglycosylation, & you

Researchers (Dr. Tara Hawkinson et al.) analyzed thousands of US health records, and found that glucosamine use was associated with:

• 25% higher likelihood of progressing from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia
• 25% higher mortality risk among people who already had Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias.

Among the patients studied, about 8% reported taking glucosamine supplements, including 2,750 people with MCI and 1,896 people with dementia.

And as for how this happened?

Dr. Hawkinson and her team found that excessive protein glycosylation (the attachment of sugar structures to proteins) appeared to be a significant driver of Alzheimer’s disease progression, suggesting that glucosamine may worsen an already overactive “sugar-tagging pathway” in the Alzheimer’s brain.

Now, that data was from humans, and/but this was an observational retrospective study, meaning it couldn’t prove cause and effect by itself.

However, when they went on to test it in mice with Alzheimer’s disease, glucosamine increased protein glycosylation and worsened social-memory performance, while suppressing glycosylation improved memory.

Back to humans: examination of post-mortem Alzheimer’s brain tissue showed significantly higher levels of protein glycosylation than in non-Alzheimer’s control brains, further supporting the idea that this pathway likely contributes to disease progression.

This is important, because glucosamine has often been considered relatively safe and has even been linked in some studies to lower risks of certain chronic diseases, but this research suggests that effects may depend on the disease context, and quite possibly may be harmful in the context of Alzheimer’s disease.

In other words:

❝A lot of these people actively take an over-the-counter supplement that could be making their disease progression worse.❞

~ Dr. Ramon Sun, a colleague of Dr. Hawkinson and fellow researcher in this study

You can read the paper itself, here: Hyperglycosylation is a metabolic driver of Alzheimer’s disease ← notice the bold statement in the title; scientists are very reticent to make concrete claims without concrete evidence. Here, they are expressing their strong clear finding that hyperglycosylation is a metabolic driver or Alzheimer’s disease.

Want to learn more?

We’ve written quite a bit about reducing the risk of cognitive decline in general and Alzheimer’s in particular; here are just a few:

• Alzheimer’s Causative Factors To Avoid
• How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk
• How To Walk Away From Alzheimer’s
• How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)
• Take Care Of Your Lymphatic System To Beat Cognitive Decline
• Goodnight, Glymphatic System: How Your Sleep Position Changes Dementia Risk
• The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)

Take care!