An unhealthy western diet could harm more than just your waistline – it may also increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
Earlier work on mice fed high-cholesterol diets found that their brain cells produced more amyloid beta, a protein linked to Alzheimer’s. There is also evidence that taking cholesterol-lowering statins makes people less likely to develop late-onset Alzheimer’s.
To better understand this link, Brett Garner of the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues used human and animal cells to probe how neurons regulate their levels of cholesterol.
They found that “ABC proteins”, which help control…
