The raison d'etre of this website is to provide you with hard scientific information which may help you make informed decisions in your quest for health (so far I have blogged concise summaries of over 1,500 scientific studies and have had three books published).

My research is mainly focused on the effects of cholesterol, saturated fat and statin drugs on health. If you know anyone who is worried about their cholesterol levels and heart disease, or has been told to take statin drugs you could send them a link to this website, and to my statin or cholesterol or heart disease books.

David Evans

Independent Health Researcher

Friday 11 March 2011

Shortage of cholesterol linked to neurodegenerative diseases

This post includes a synopsis of a paper published in Neurobiology of Disease 2009 May;34(2):212-20

Study title and authors:
Aneuploidy in the normal, Alzheimer's disease and ataxia-telangiectasia brain: differential expression and pathological meaning.
Iourov IY, Vorsanova SG, Liehr T, Yurov YB.

National Research Center of Mental Health, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow, Russia.ivan_iourov@yahoo.com

This paper can be accessed at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19344645

Aneuploid cells have an abnormal number of chromosomes and may form because of a shortage of cholesterol. See here.

The study measured the number of aneuploid cells in the brains of people with:
(a) No disease
(b) Alzheimer's disease
(c) Ataxia Telangiectasia

The study revealed that:
(1) The overall proportion of aneuploid cells in the normal brain is approximately 10%.
(2) The overall proportion of aneuploid cells in the brain of ataxia telangiectasia individuals was estimated at approximately 20-50%.
(3) A dramatic 10-fold increase of chromosome 21-specific aneuploidy was detected in individuals with Alzheimer's disease.

Iourov concluded that neural aneuploidy to be a feature of neurodegenerative diseases.