Nobody puts Glucosamine on their worry list. It's just something you grab at Walgreens or Costco because your knees have been flaring up, and besides, your doctor never said you shouldn't take it. Turns out, we need to rethink that assumption.
Supplement-related warnings are starting to pile up. Researchers at the University of Florida pored file cabinets of health records on more than 50,000 patients and pinpointed a pattern that's causing some cocked eyes in medical circles. People with already existing mild cognitive impairment and taking Glucosamine were 25% more likely to slide into full onset Alzheimer's disease. And for people who already had an Alzheimer's diagnosis, the supplement was tied to a 25% higher death rate over five years.
Conventional thinking is why would a joint supplement affect the brain at all, even just a little? The trick up its sleeve Glucosamine has is that it can actually cross the blood-brain barrier – a factoid most people don't know. Once it gets to the brain, then it appears to worsen something that Alzheimer's brains already do too much of — over-attaching sugar molecules to proteins in ways that confuse normal cell function. The UF team thinks this isn't just a byproduct of the disease, but may be a driver of the disease.
Smart Senior Daily Staff
Worth Saying
Before you throw out that bottle of Glucosamine in your medicine cabinet, press pause. This is not a smoking gun. The study is purely observational. Researchers looked at what happened to patients who were already taking glucosamine, and wrote about what they saw as opposed to a randomized trial where they assigned the use Glucosamine deliberately. The numbers are real but the causal link isn't airtight. A proper clinical trial still needs to happen.
What you do with that depends on your situation. If your memory is fine and there's no one in your family tree who's had Alzheimer's, this is not something to lose sleep over right now. But if cognitive decline is already on your radar — meaning if a physician has mentioned anything, or you've noticed changes on your own — it's a reasonable thing to raise at your next appointment.
