The ad ran three times during one hour of evening television. Gail watched all three. The third time, she turned to me and said, “Maybe I should try that one.” She meant Prevagen. The jellyfish pill. The one with the smiling woman who remembers everything now.
I told Gail I’d look into it. That promise cost me four months.
Prevagen’s active ingredient is apoaequorin, a protein first found in a glowing jellyfish. Proteins get digested. The company’s own safety studies, cited in the federal complaint against it, show apoaequorin is broken down in the stomach into amino acids like any other dietary protein. Scientists at the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation say it is unlikely to survive the gut or reach the brain at all.
Then there’s the trial. Quincy Bioscience ran one study, the Madison Memory Study, on 218 adults over 90 days. Participants were tested on nine cognitive tasks. Prevagen beat placebo on none of them. The company then ran more than thirty additional analyses on the same data, carving it into smaller and smaller subgroups until a few results looked good and built its advertising around those. The Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General sued in 2017. A jury heard the case in early 2024 and found that all eight of the company’s memory claims lacked competent scientific support. In late 2024 the court ordered those claims pulled nationwide. Quincy has appealed. A federal appeals panel heard arguments in February and has not yet ruled, so this fight is not over.
Here is the part that mattered most to me as Gail’s husband. Prevagen has never been tested in people with dementia. Not once. The research was done in healthy adults worried about ordinary forgetfulness, which is a different situation entirely from the one we live in.
Prevagen appears safe. Safe and effective are different words. At twenty-five to sixty dollars a month, safe and useless is still expensive.
That evening with Gail sent me through fifty over-the-counter supplements, one at a time, reading the actual trials instead of the actual commercials. Some surprised me in the other direction. A few of these things work. Most don’t. The difference is knowable, and nobody was handing it to caregivers in plain language.
So I wrote it down. Prevagen is Entry 29.
If you want me to research a particular drug or supplement, email me at gregg@atenda.care.
Gregg
Get a letter like this every Tuesday.
