Taking statins may help

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By comparing brain tissue of people who had taken statins with those who had not, US scientists have established for the first time that taking statins may help to stave off the telltale signs of Alzheimer's. Statins are taken by millions of Americans every day to lower cholesterol and reduce risk and symptoms of heart disease. They are a class of drugs known as HMG coenzyme A reductase inhibitors that includes rosuvastatin (Crestor), atorvastatin (Lipitor), simvastatin (Zocor), and lovastatin (Mevacor).

The most vulnerable regions of the brain include the amygdala, the hippocampus and surrounding regions, and neural pathways that transmit the catecholaminergic, seritonergic and cholinergic signals essential for memory, judgement, reasoning, and verbal fluency, among other cognitive skills.
ACT (Adult Changes in Thought) is a joint project of Group Health, a consumer-governed, nonprofit health care system based in Seattle, Washington, and the University of Washington. It is a prospective cohort study that began in 1994 and the participants are a random sample of Group Health members aged 65 and above who were not experiencing thinking problems when they enrolled.

The researchers looked for the definitive hallmarks of Alzheimer's: plaques and tangles in the brain. After controlling for a range of demographic and health variables such as age at death, gender, and strokes in the brain, Li and colleagues found there were significantly fewer plaques and tangles in the brains of people who had taken statins compared with those who had not.

Leader of the ACT study, and executive director of Group Health Center for Health Studies, Dr Eric Larson said: "These results are exciting, novel, and have important implications for prevention strategies." Larson said that the ACT programme is more rigorous than the average observational epidemiological study because it is based in a community population, it uses reliable automated pharmacy records, and the autopsies were performed on people who had dementia and on people who did not. The researchers hope that one day it may be possible to know precisely which patients will benefit from which type of statin for protecting against the onset of Alzheimer's.

Study extends understanding of phytosterol benefits
Phytosterol-enriched products may reduce apolipoprotein levels by up to four per cent, says a new study that highlights these markers as better than traditional risk factors.

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