Synopsis
American filmmaker Sol Tryon and German documentary director Marcus Vetter met when they were both planning to make a film about Dr. Dale Bredesen, a San Francisco neurologist who, after more than 40 years of research into Alzheimer’s disease had come to believe that the only way to a successful cure was through a multi-pronged approach of exercise, diet, sleep and detoxification that would eliminate the severe inflammation in the body and brain that causes the disease, which is still incurable today. In a book published in 2021, titled THE FIRST SURVIVORS OF ALZHEIMER’S, he presented the successful treatment of his first 100 patients, including Judy Benjamin, patient zero, who was treated with his protocol when she was 67 years old and is now 80 and runs marathons.
When Sol and Marcus began filming the first approved clinical trial of what has come to be known as the Dr. Bredesen Protocol in 2023, their cameraman Jeff Cunningham, who filmed the first interview with Bredesen, was diagnosed with a severe form of Alzheimer’s disease. The directors tried to include him in the clinical trial as a patient but were unable to do so because Jeff’s Alzheimer’s was already too advanced to be approved for the trial. However, despite his rapid decline, and with the help of Dr. Bredesen, they managed to get him the same treatment and care as the patients in the clinical trial.
The film follows the clinical trial over an 18-month period, while also showing the struggle of the doctors involved in the trial, who, together with Dr. Bredesen and Jeff’s parents, are trying to stop the progression of Jeff’s Alzheimer’s disease, which is already so advanced that a complete cure seems impossible.
“The Alzheimer Code” (working title) is a feature length documentary that explores the cause, effects and different treatment approaches of Alzheimer’s Disease, through the eyes of those that are living with it. It will take a completely unbiased approach and look at both sides. We are determined to accept and incorporate into the film any results we encounter during the course of the filming.
While the large-scale clinical trial of the Bredesen Protocol is a common thread throughout, the emotional journey of the audience will be with our our cameraman Jeff Cunningham. When he was diagnosed with Alzheimer in January of 2024, he had a MOCA Score (an Alzheimer’s cognitive assessment test) of 18. MOCA scores range from 0 – 30. A score of 26 and higher is considered normal. Eight months later with the start of his treatment with the protocol his MoCA Score had declined to 7, even though he had taken the Alzheimer drug Aducanumab. The brain damage was so severe that reversing the damage seems impossible. But within in a short period of time he began to show signs of improvement. After being only 6 months in the treatment Jeffs MoCA score rose to 12. The jury is still out on his future improvements.
Protagonists
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Dr. Dale Bredesen earned his medical degree at Duke University Medical Center and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner’s laboratory at the University of California. Dr. Bredesen worked for many years as chief of neurology at the University of California at San Francisco. Later he held teaching positions at several prestigious universities and directed the program on “aging” at the Burnham Institute. In 1998, he founded the Buck Institute and initiated a paradigm shift in Alzheimer’s research based in part on the findings of his research on aging. He broke into previously uncharted territory in explaining the physical mechanisms behind memory loss in Alzheimer’s and stating that an effective treatment for incurable Alzheimer’s disease may not be a drug, but a multi-faceted approach.
He received a great deal of criticism for that, with colleagues who had worked with him for years turning their backs on him. The Alzheimer’s Association in Washington said he was raising false hopes. The film will let these voices have their say and will endeavor to shed light on the debate. In 2000 Bredesen started to conduct his first studies using a “multi-modular” treatment – based on correcting a patient’s individual deficits as determined by analyzing his blood and other factors such as environmental toxins, diet, exercise and sleep. Ten years later, in 2010, he applied for a clinical trial. Several investors agreed to pay for the enormous cost of the study. Everything was in place. But unfortunately, the federal agency did not approve the study. The reason given: a multi-modal approach was not scientific and therefore could not be supported. This was a disaster. But then Judy, “Patient Zero,” happened to show up in Dr. Bredesen’s office. By a surprising twist of fate, he suddenly had the opportunity to try his treatment approach despite the rejected study.
With doctors and patients around the world, he began developing a therapy he called the “Bredesen Protocol.” In it, he identified 36 problem areas, such as too little sleep, too little exercise, stress, poor diet, vitamin deficiencies, heavy metal and/or fungal exposure, chronic inflammation in the body, and more. If one manages to plug a majority of these 36 holes, according to Bredesen, not only does Alzheimer’s disease stop, but in the vast majority of cases there is a noticeable improvement in cognitive abilities, which can be measured in brain scans. In some cases, such brain scans showed that the hippocampus, which had shrunk due to Alzheimer’s disease, grew back to its original size.
Judy Benjamin
Patient Zero
Judy Benjamin an 80 year old former international development expert was the first to take the leap and commit completely to the Bredesen Protocol. She now works as a coach for Alzheimer’s patients to help them implement the protocol into their lives. We will meet her in this capacity in the beginning of the film and only later learn that she was patient zero.
In April 2025 Judy will walk across America to raise the awareness about the Bredesen protocol. She is passionate about telling her story so that others can benefit as she has. 14 years ago, she couldn’t remember a 4 digit number, her phone number, her pets’ names, or how to find her way on the freeway. Today her brain is better than it was in her youth. What happened? She would be dead today had she not found Dr. Bredesen and began to follow his protocol. This is why at age 80, she has decided to walk across the country.
Dr. Kat Toops
Dr. Kat Toops is one of the doctors who, together with Dr. Bredesen, is implementing the clinical trial. At 50, the now 58-year-old was running a research center for Alzheimer’s clinical trials when she suddenly developed early Alzheimer’s herself. For 20 years, she tested Alzheimer’s patients to grade their cognitive abilities, until one day she herself could not remember the terms she wanted her subjects to remember. Soon she could no longer operate a computer, she lost the ability to drive a car, she needed a hearing aid because the brain was no longer able to decode words. She had to quit her job. After that she developed multiple sensitivities and was allergic to all kinds of things. She developed rashes, hives and developed an autoimmune disease.
When no one knew how to help her, she attended a conference on ‘Food as Medicine’ that would change her life: “I thought I was eating healthy. I was eating organic foods but had to learn that there is so much more to what we eat and how it has the power to harm or heal us.” Dr. Toops then began studying functional medicine, relying on fellow students to help her learn because her brain was like a sieve that couldn’t retain anything. But over time, she worked through all the layers that were responsible for the inflammation of her brain, and after three years, it finally got better. It was the same tools she learned in her functional medicine studies, and tried on herself, that she will now use in this clinical trial to find the cause of her Alzheimer’s patients’ disease. Today, Dr. Toops is one of the three female doctors involved in the clinical trial.
Dr. David Hase
Dr. David Hase is one of the investigators for the clinical trial. His practice is just outside of Nashville, Tennessee and he prides himself on exploring all possible treatments to improve his patients’ health. In addition to the Bredesen Protocol, he implements numerous other techniques, including Plasma Exchange, a new and fascinating treatment process that rejuvenates the stem cells in the body by removing the “old” plasma from the blood and replacing it with clean, individualized, plasma-like replacement fluids, electrolytes and other regeneration promoting factors. Since it has been learned that stem cells take on the age of their surroundings, this treatment replaces the “old” plasma with these regenerative substances, making the stem cells behave as if they are young as well. This, supposedly, reverses the effects of aging and can slow the decline of Alzheimer’s patients by over 60% all by itself. At the forefront of the Functional Medicine community, Dr. Hase is clearly on a path to bring unheard of results to the field of neurological and medical healthcare.
Dr. Craig Tanio
Dr. Craig Tanio practices in Hollywood Florida and is another investigator in the trial. Being in south Florida presents challenges different than others because mold toxicity is rampant and almost impossible to control. Dr. Tanio has been working with the Bredesen Protocol for many years with very positive results. One of the treatments he uses in addition to the Bredesen Protocol is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, which creates improvement in tissue oxygenation, produces anti-inflammatory effects, induces a proliferation and migration of stem cells and restores mitochondrial function. All of these elements supposedly produce exceptional improvements in cognitive performance, especially in the executive function and information processing areas.
The Film
Ten years after Dr. Bredesen’s initial trial was rejected, a new clinical trial with a total of 100 patients was approved by the IRB (Institutional Review Board) that started in July 2023. This will be a central narrative throughout the film. We will follow the progress of the clinical trial over a year, through the eyes of the characters above as well as several other patients involved with the trial. We will follow the implementation of the protocol, observe successes as well as defeats.
The patients will be divided into two groups, one group is treated according to the Bredesen protocol (test group) and the other with conventional medication (control group). After 6 months, the control group will be given the opportunity to switch to a new test group. We will follow the work of the doctors who, like forensic scientists, try to find the many “holes” that need to be treated.
One of the major exclusion criteria in selecting patients for the trial is around mold contamination in their homes. Once a candidate passes through the first phase of pre-screenings, a mold specialist is sent to their homes for inspection. If mold is found, the candidate must either agree to remediate the toxic mold or move to another housing arrangement for the duration of the trial. If they don’t agree to this, they will be rejected from the trial.
Many of Dr. Bredesen’s critics call out the cost of adhering to his protocol as being excessive. Their argument is that between the cost of the doctors, the supplements, the food and exercise that are required, results in only those with financial privilege can actually afford it. Dr. Bredesen’s response to that is that it is far cheaper than the cost of the medications that have consistently proven not to work, and the cost of nursing homes.
In a third story arc we will explore the emotional journey of our cameraman Jeff, a former mountain climber who travelled to over 30 countries in the world. Lately Jeff has lived in an apartment full of mold. The latest blood test results revealed that he had one of the highest levels of mold in his body that Dr. Bredesen has ever seen. Mold is one of the major causes of Alzheimer‘s with 15% of the population susceptible to it.
Film crew
Marcus Vetter
Director
Marcus Vetter (born 1967) graduated in Economics (1991) and Media Theory and Practice (1994). Since 1994 he has been working as a TV editor, producer and director at ARD/SWR in Baden-Baden and Stuttgart. His films have received attention at national and international film festivals and won numerous prizes, including three Adolf Grimme Awards – the German equivalent of the Emmy, and the German Film Prize – the German equivalent of the Oscar. Marcus‘ work first came to the attention of an international audience with his 1999 film „The Tunnel“, a docu-drama about a legendary escape tunnel in Berlin. The film received the Grimme Prize, the German TV Award and a Special Mention at the Prix Europa. He went on to make numerous films including „The Battle for Brukman“, about rebellious seamstresses in Argentina, „My Father the Turk“, a film about the encounter with his Turkish father that won the Golden Gate Award in San Francisco. He has gone on to make Heart of Jenin (BRD 2008, 90min), Cinema Jenin – The Story of a Dream (BRD 2011, 90min), The Court (BRD 2012, 90min), The Forecaster (BRD/USA 2015, 100min) and the film THE PROMISE/KILLING FOR LOVE (BRD/USA 2017, 130min) which theatrically released in October 2016 and has been one of the best rated documentaries at the BBC. His latest film THE FORUM about Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum in Davos was broadcasted in over 15 European countries.
Sol Tryon
Director
Sol Tryon is an American filmmaker and storyteller. He began his career in New York City in the late 90’s and produced his first feature, Bomb The System, in 2003, for which he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best first feature. He has since produced numerous award-winning films, including Weapons, Explicit Ills, Starlet, 2012: Time for Change, Monogamish, and Weed The People. His latest films include Land of Dreams- Venice Film Festival 2021, Tribeca Film Festival 2022; Amerikatsi- Jury Award for Best Narrative Film and Best Cinematography at the Woodstock Film Festival, Audience Award at FilmFest Hamburg; In the Eye of the Storm- a six-part documentary series about the political odyssey of Yanis Varoufakis, which premiered at Hot Docs in 2022. Sol’s directorial debut, The Living Wake (Jesse Eisenberg, Mike O’Connell, Jim Gaffigan and Ann Dowd), received critical praise and numerous awards from top festivals as well as a theatrical release across the US and abroad. In 2020 Sol co-founded Palodeon Pictures with his wife Rebecca Comerford. They currently live in Ojai, California with their two children. Sol aspires to create stories that shine a light on the issues facing humanity and foster conversation towards how we perceive, and thus create, the world we live in.
Ulf Meyer
Producer
Ulf is specialized with his production company addictivefilm in online marketing and distribution strategies for feature films and documentary movies. In close cooperation with filmmaker Marcus Vetter and his company Filmperspektive, a total of 8 feature films have been produced since 2008, in which he was involved in various functions, for example, as a second Cameraman in projects such as the movie CINEMA JENIN (2009) and as a producer in KILLING FOR LOVE (aka The Promise 2016) and the latest movie “Tunnel to freedom” released in 2021.
Erik Felderhof
Producer
Erik is an award-winning producer and best known as the creator and executive producer of the intimate reality series The Journey: a music make-over show (2022) and for executive producing the award-winning KCET (PBS) interview series Kamp Solutions (2019) which is famous for reporting on groundbreaking climate solutions, and it is renowned guest line-up. Other notable recent producer credits include the exhilarating boxing documentary Teofilo (2022) about the remarkable life of the three-time World and Olympic boxing Champion Teófilo Stevenson.
Directors Statement
Marcus Vetter
When I first heard about the American neurologist Dr. Bredesen in a podcast two years ago, who was said to have cured hundreds of Alzheimer’s patients with a multi-modular approach, this story was stored in my memory, since Alzheimer’s was generally considered to be an incurable disease. A short time later, I heard the name again, in a Ted Talk by a scientist on the subject of “aging,” who in this talk emphasized the importance of “sleep” in the aging process. It was precisely one of these adjusting screws, I recalled, that needed to be improved in Bredesen’s multi-modular approach to halting Alzheimer’s disease. I started reading about Dr. Bredesen on the Internet, and I ordered his book ‘The End of Alzheimer´s,’ which was highly praised by many readers, but also criticized by the medical press for raising unwarranted hopes. Vitamin and hormone deficiencies, poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of good quality sleep, could all be responsible for inflammatory processes in the body, which can then have a negative effect on the brain, Bredesen said. I was riveted while reading, but how was I going to find out how reputable this American neurologist from San Francisco really was.
I wrote to him that I was interested in visiting him in the US. He replied immediately. Corona made it impossible to travel at first. But I could not get the subject out of my mind. In October 2021, the time finally came. I went to a congress in Miami, where Dr. Bredesen presented the results of a preliminary study to doctors and alternative practitioners. I met an energetic man who looked much younger than he really was. He spent an entire afternoon talking about his work: that interval fasting, low-carbohydrate diets, exercise and sleep were the main pillars of the so-called Bredesen protocol; he talked about vitamin supplements, hidden tooth decay and amyloids, those slags in the brain that he himself had spent decades researching and which had led science to a dead end. There were over 400 failed Alzheimer’s drug trials. But what particularly stuck in my mind from the conversation was the following sentence: “Many of my old colleagues don’t talk to me anymore. They are so angry that they literally write about how terrible what we are doing is.”
Dr. Bredesen was considered a luminary in his field. He studied at the best universities until at some point he left the generally accepted line of research and and took a multi-faceted approach. But why did he get such opposition?
I also met with Judy, Julie and Kat on this trip, three of the so-called Alzheimer’s survivors. Before embarking on such a film, I wanted to meet these Alzheimer’s patients. Even the first phone call with Judy surprised me; she was the first patient treated by Dr. Bredesen and her voice was clear and authoritative. We met in Washington, and I conducted a camera research interview with her. Her narrative of how she received her Alzheimer’s diagnosis 10 years ago, how her memory failed her and she didn’t want to end up like her mother who had Alzheimer’s, and how she then got in touch with Dr. Bredesen through a friend, was so focused and eloquent that I never felt like I was sitting across from someone with Alzheimer’s. Even when I later watched the interview on the editing table, I was able to use it almost uncut, which never actually happens, because really everyone gets lost at times, falters, and searches for words when speaking in front of a camera. Oddly enough, that wasn’t the case with Judy. The other Alzheimer’s patients I met on my research trip also had this clarity in their speech. How was that possible?
Could it be possible that a cure for these people came not from a pill developed by a pharmaceutical company, but perhaps from the will of these patience, under the guidance of functional doctors who look at the whole person, to change their lives and listen to their bodies.
In recent years, health as a fundamental value has become deeply anchored in the consciousness of young people in particular and has become synonymous with a high quality of life. As a central goal in life, this mega-trend is shaping all areas of life, industries and companies. The observation of a clinical trial that relies on a holistic approach gives the film the opportunity to dive unbiased into the world of medicine, the outcome of which is completely open.
I am more than thrilled to be joined on this journey by Sol Tryon, the co-director of this film, who is not only an experienced producer and also an award-winning director of feature films, but who himself is very connected to the subject of the film through his wife Rebecca.
Directors Statement
Sol Tryon
If you are like me and have seen the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s Disease firsthand, then you know there could be nothing more terrifying in life to experience. I saw my father in-law deteriorate, over several years, from a strong, intelligent and caring man into a lost, scared and confused shell of his former self. Shortly after he passed, my wife was poisoned by an antibiotic. She started losing strength, having constant nerve twitches and pains in every part of her body. Within a month she was in a wheelchair and unable to get herself to the bathroom. Her mind started wandering on her as well and there were clear signals of cognitive decline. Through an exhaustive and expensive process, we finally found a path that led her out of the wheelchair, back into her mind and body, enabling her to regain the ability to be the mother and wife she had always been. Thankfully we have our lives back now and are able to contemplate a future filled with joy and life. However, in the back of our minds exists the fear that Alzheimer’s Disease, which is often hereditary, will one day rear its monstrous head within our family again.
A few months prior to my wife’s illness, I was working on a TV show, where one of the episodes focused on Dr. Dale Bredesen, who was saying that his protocol was curing people with Alzheimer’s. With my father in-law in the final phase of his battle with the disease, I was very curious to hear what he was saying. His approach resonated with me. The results people have reported were astounding and the more he explained things, the more it made me think that there may actually be an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately for my family, my father in-law passed away shortly after first hearing about this work. But everything I heard stuck with me and a few months later when my wife was struggling with her illness and started figuring out a protocol for herself, there were several elements that reminded me of Dr. Bredesen’s work. One day she mentioned to me that one of the doctors, Dr. Terry Wahls, that she had been reading about was doing a functional medicine workshop in partnership with Dr. Bredesen. After seeing the positive effects for my wife using a similar type of treatment, it confirmed to me that there was something special to what Dr. Bredesen and Dr. Wahls were doing.
Fast forward through two years of pandemic living, and we are now in a place where my wife is almost fully healthy and prepared to begin the next phase of her life. Throughout that time, I’ve been developing a project centered around a potential cure for Alzheimer’s. In connecting with amazing partners, we are finally at the precipice of getting it up and running. In our research and development process we have been looking for characters afflicted with Alzheimer’s, in various stages, that could help tell the story of recovery.
One through-line that continues to come up is the need to share the potential for preventative treatments through a deeper understanding of the Bredesen Protocol. If the protocol that is being done can help people with advanced Alzheimer’s regress, it could surely help people with the genetic disposition for Alzheimer’s from ever developing it in the first place.
This line of thought, leads me back to my wife, Rebecca. While I am hoping to gain knowledge that could help us avoid the nasty specter of Alzheimer’s rearing it’s ugly head again in our family, I am also hopeful that our efforts can help raise awareness for other’s in similar situations from ever having to face such trauma in the first place. So, this documentary that I believe holds great importance on a global scale has also become the most personally significant film I will ever create.