“Between Hope and Proof: Evaluating Interventions for People Living with Dementia.”  

I’ve spent the last several weeks deep in research papers, clinical trials, and medical journals. Not because I wanted to become an expert. Because I needed to become one.

When you’re caring for someone with dementia, everyone has a suggestion. Your neighbor swears by turmeric. Your cousin read about lion’s mane mushrooms. The internet promises miracles from supplements with names you can’t pronounce. And you stand there in the vitamin aisle, overwhelmed, wondering which bottle might actually help and which one is just expensive hope in a capsule.

I’ve been there. I am there. And I got tired of not knowing.

So I started writing. What began as a simple reference document has grown into a three-volume guide called “Between Hope and Proof: Evaluating Interventions for People Living with Dementia.” Volume One covers fifty supplements and over-the-counter interventions. Volume Two will tackle pharmaceuticals. Volume Three addresses lifestyle protocols and comprehensive approaches like the Bredesen ReCODE program.

Here’s what I’ve learned, and it surprised me.

The supplement industry is full of products that failed their own clinical trials. Prevagen, one of the most heavily advertised “brain health” supplements in America, was sued by the FTC for deceptive advertising. Their own study failed to meet its primary endpoints. The active ingredient, a protein from jellyfish, gets digested in your stomach before it can ever reach your brain. That’s not opinion. That’s biology.

But here’s what else I learned: some interventions have real evidence behind them. Vitamin E, at 2000 IU daily, showed genuine benefit for slowing decline in people with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s in a major VA study. Not prevention. Not a cure. But meaningful slowing of functional decline. The catch? It only works for people already diagnosed, and you need to use the right form at the right dose.

That pattern repeated itself across fifty entries. The devil is always in the details. Which form of magnesium crosses the blood-brain barrier? What dose of omega-3s was actually used in the positive trials? Why did ginkgo work in European studies but fail in American ones? The answer often comes down to standardization, timing, and who was studied.

One finding hit me harder than the others: timing matters more than almost anything else.

The interventions with the best evidence tend to work early in the disease process, if they work at all. By the time someone is in moderate or severe dementia, the window for many interventions has closed. This isn’t pessimism. It’s reality. And it means that the research you do today, the questions you ask today, the actions you take today, matter more than you might think.

I want to be clear about something. I don’t give advice in this guide. I don’t make recommendations. I don’t tell you what to do.

What I do is lay out the evidence, honestly, completely, without the hype you’ll find on supplement bottles and without the dismissiveness you might get from a rushed doctor’s appointment. I tell you what the studies actually found, who funded them, how big they were, and what the limitations are. Then you decide.

Why? Because if you’ve met one person with dementia, you’ve met one person with dementia. What helps one person may do nothing for another. What works early may not work late. What’s right for your family depends on factors no guide can capture.

But you deserve to make those decisions with real information. Not marketing. Not wishful thinking. Not dismissal. Information.

I’m writing this guide for Atenda, our AI caregiver companion, so she can have informed conversations with the families who turn to her. But I’m also writing it for the caregiver sitting in that vitamin aisle right now, phone in hand, trying to figure out if the thirty-dollar bottle is worth it.

The answer is: it depends. And now there will be a place to find out what it depends on.

Volume One is complete. Fifty entries. Each one researched, each one honest, each one written with the understanding that behind every question about supplements is a person who loves someone and wants to help.

That’s the space between hope and proof. That’s where caregivers live. And that’s where this guide meets you.

More to come.

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Gregg