Dr. Dale Bredesen, an Alzheimer's disease researcher at UCLA and the Buck Center for Aging has found that a significant number of purported dementia cases are actually caused by mold exposure, and not Alzheimer's disease at all.
Memory Loss
Alzheimer's researcher Dr. Amen found that memory loss from mold is often misdiagnosed as dementia or Alzheimer's. However, it can be reversed by taking the individual out of a moldy environment, unlike memory loss diseases.
Patients who eventually end up with dementia often have all the lab estimations of CIRS. They commonly have a HLA‐DR/DQ that is related to Mold or Lyme. He reports in his findings that many individuals who have intellectual decay, who are coming in with the Type 3, have numerous exposures with mold.
Bredesen's “Inhalation Alzheimer's” he reported patients who developed Type 3 Alzheimer's after prolonged exposure to mold. Type 3 appears to develop as a protective effect against toxins, such as heavy metals and mycotoxins from mold.
Symptoms of mold illness
People who live, work, or go to school in moldy buildings complain of pain, fatigue, increased anxiety, depression, and cognitive defects such as memory loss. Researchers say the symptoms are similar to those from bacterial or viral infections, due to the inflammatory cascades mold triggers.
This is an incredibly important finding! Many patients with memory loss and dementia are actually simply toxic from mold, which is a reversible condition.
When the toxins enter your body, via skin or air, the toxic gases cause a disturbance in many organs, including your brain. Often confused as just allergies, or “just being out of it,” mold infections can affect cognitive function, especially in the frontal cortical area.
Detoxing out mold (after confirming the individual has a clean environment) takes around a year in most cases. For these reasons, working with a professional is necessary.
Human exposure to molds, mycotoxins, and water-damaged buildings can cause neurologic and neuropsychiatric signs and symptoms.
Discovering Black Mold
Toxic mold exposure has also been linked to more serious, long-term effects like memory loss, insomnia, anxiety, depression, trouble concentrating, and confusion.
Exposure to a large number of mold spores may cause allergic symptoms such as watery eyes, runny nose, sneezing, itching, coughing, wheezing, difficulty breathing, headache, and fatigue. Repeated exposure to mold can increase a person's sensitivity, causing more severe allergic reactions.
A blood test, sometimes called the radioallergosorbent test, can measure your immune system's response to mold by measuring the amount of certain antibodies in your bloodstream known as immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies.
Do air purifiers help with mold? Air purifiers help capture mold spores from the air, preventing them from reproducing and spreading throughout your home. While air purifiers won't help treat active mold that's already present on surfaces, they are a great way to control the spread of airborne mold particles.
Urine mycotoxin tests are ideal for testing yourself (and your family members) for mycotoxin exposure.
Mold toxicity can manifest in different ways in people. It's more commonly linked to physical problems, such as difficulty breathing, fatigue, and headaches, but research shows that it can present itself in a psychiatric way, too. This includes brain fog, depression, anxiety, problems concentrating, and insomnia.
Certain testing can illustrate just how severely mold mycotoxins impact the brain's function, chemical balance, and ability to process information. NeuroQuant analyzes high-resolution images from an MRI scan of the brain to quantify the volume of the hippocampus, temporal horn, and other structures of the brain.
In another review, the involvement of the CNS after the exposure to indoor air DM was reported as follows: significant fatigue, weakness (70-100% of cases), neurocognitive dysfunction such as memory loss, irritability, anxiety, and depression in more than 40% of cases [10].
There's no proof that mold toxins cause diseases in people, so you don't need to detox after mold exposure. The best way to feel better if you have black mold allergy symptoms is to get out of the moldy environment and avoid any continued exposure.
The most common black mold symptoms and health effects are associated with a respiratory response. Chronic coughing and sneezing, irritation to the eyes, mucus membranes of the nose and throat, rashes, chronic fatigue and persistent headaches can all be symptomatic of black mold exposure or black mold poisoning.