Parkinson's and LDL Cholesterol

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LDL cholesterol link...

Pieces coming together in Parkinson's, cholesterol puzzle
April 4, 2008 - In 2006, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers published a study that found people with low levels of LDL cholesterol are more likely to have Parkinson's disease than people with high LDL levels.

But that study could not answer the question of whether low LDL (low-density lipoprotein) levels were present in study participants before they were diagnosed with Parkinson’s, or if they developed low LDL levels after being diagnosed. Now a follow-up study led by UNC researchers in collaboration with colleagues in Virginia, Hawaii and Japan has found that low LDL levels were present in a group of men of Japanese ancestry long before these men were diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

“This finding gives us one more piece in the puzzle about the role of cholesterol in Parkinson’s disease,” said Dr. Xuemei Huang, the study’s principal investigator. Huang is also medical director of the Movement Disorder Clinic at UNC Hospitals and an assistant professor of neurology in the UNC School of Medicine. “What makes these results especially useful is the fact that most of the men in this study were not taking cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins,” Huang said. “This suggests that the association between low LDL levels and Parkinson’s exists independently from statin use, which helps answer another important question raised by our earlier study.”

The new study was published online this week by the journal Movement Disorders. Huang is the lead author. Her co-authors include Drs. G. Webster Ross and Helen Petrovitch, who are both with the Pacific Health Research Institute, the Veterans Affairs Pacific Islands Health Care System and the University of Hawaii; Dr. Robert D. Abbott of the University of Virginia and Shiga University in Japan; and Dr. Richard B. Mailman, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the UNC School of Medicine.

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Loss of smell may be early sign of Parkinson’s
Fri., April. 4, 2008 - Finding could be used as screening tool for the disease, researchers say

An impaired sense of smell is known to be associated with Parkinson's disease — and now a study in the Annals of Neurology shows that the loss of smell may predate the onset of clinical symptoms by several years. "Olfactory screening could help in the early detection of Parkinson's disease before the typical motor signs are evident," lead investigator Dr. G. Webster Ross told Reuters Health.

Ross of the VA Pacific Islands Health Care System, Honolulu, and colleagues evaluated data from a standardized test of odor identification from 2,267 men of Japanese ancestry participating in an aging study. All were free of clinical Parkinson's disease and dementia at the time of testing. The average age at study entry was 80 years old and the men were followed for up to 8 years.

During follow-up, 35 men were diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, giving an overall incidence of 24.6 cases per 10,000 persons per year. The average time to diagnosis was 4 years and the average age was 83 years. After taking into consideration the potential influence of age, the incidence of Parkinson's disease was 8.4 per 10,000 persons per year for those with the highest smell identification scores and 54.5 per 10,000 persons per year in those with the lowest scores.

More Loss of smell early sign of Parkinson's - More health news - MSNBC.com

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Blood pressure/dementia link...

Blood pressure 'link to dementia'
Tuesday, 8 July 2008 - Controlling blood pressure from middle-age onwards may cut the chances of developing dementia, say researchers.

Two studies support a link between high blood pressure and dementia risk - with one by an Imperial College London team suggesting treatment could cut this. This study, by published in the Lancet Neurology journal, found blood pressure drugs reduce dementia by 13%. The Alzheimer's Society said better control could save 15,000 lives a year. "Only half of people over 65 receive effective treatment, yet we know treatment works" - Professor Clive Ballard, Alzheimer's Society

As many as one in four people has high blood pressure, in many cases undiagnosed or untreated. The precise reasons why high blood pressure might increase the risk of dementia are not fully understood although many scientists believe that it can starve the brain of bloodflow and the oxygen it carries. Patients suffering this restricted bloodflow are often described as having "vascular dementia", and account for approximately a quarter of dementia patients.

Other types of dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, have no obvious link to bloodflow, but some experts think that blood pressure may still be somehow contributory in some cases. The Lancet Neurology study looked at a trial of elderly patients with high blood pressure to see if those who were receiving treatment were less likely to develop any form of dementia compared with those left untreated.

Clear benefit

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Now I know why great-grampa smoked Camels...

Nicotine drug 'may slow dementia'
Sunday, 13 July 2008 : Nicotine-based drugs may help delay the moment a person with dementia has to enter a care home, researchers say.

Nicotine has toxic effects, and carries a strong risk of addiction, but scientists have shown it can also boost learning, memory and attention. The effect is small, but it may help give dementia patients up to six extra months of independent living.

A team at King's College London have demonstrated the positive effects of nicotine in experiments on rats. "It may be possible for medicinal chemists to devise compounds that provide some of the beneficial effects of nicotine while cutting out the toxic effects" - Professor Ian Stolerman, Institute of Psychiatry

They showed that nicotine boosted the animals' ability to carry out a task accurately - particularly when they were also distracted. When able to give full concentration, the animals responded correctly to stimuli about 80% of the time. Nicotine boosted the accuracy rate by about 5%. However, when distracted, the animals' success rate fell to about 55%. In this case nicotine brought it back up to around the 85% level.

Biochemical mechanisms

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Hope it can help Dr. Steven Hawking...

Scientists Turn Skin Cells Into Motor Neurons in ALS Patients
July 31, 2008 - Feat could one day lead to tailor-made cells to treat fatal disease, researchers say

Scientists have turned skin cells from patients with Lou Gehrig's disease into motor neurons that are genetically identical to the patients' own neurons. An unlimited number of these neurons can now be created and studied in the laboratory, a capability which should result in a better understanding of the disease and, one day, lead to new treatments or even the production of healthy cells that can replace the diseased ones.

"The hope of some scientists is that they might be able to harness stem cells and program them to generate pluripotent stem cell lines [capable of differentiating into many different types of cells] which have the genes of patients," said Kevin Eggan, co-author of a paper appearing July 31 in the online version of Science. "This would open up the possibility of producing a large supply of immune-matched cells to that patient that could be used in transplantation methodologies."

"The other hope, and one that's much closer upon us . . . is if you could produce the cell types that become sick in that person, you might be able to use them in the laboratory to come to understand basic aspects of the disease and take the study of disease out of patients, where it's very difficult, and put it into the Petri dish," added Eggan, who is a principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and spoke about the research at a teleconference Wednesday. However, the actual therapeutic potential of this approach is still years away.

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