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High serum cholesterol levels have been linked not only to an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, but also to an increased risk of memory disorders. In the majority of the population, dietary cholesterol affects serum cholesterol levels only slightly, and many nutrition recommendations worldwide no longer set limitations on the intake of dietary cholesterol. In carriers of APOE4, however, the effect of dietary cholesterol on serum cholesterol levels is more visible. In Finland, the prevalence of APOE4, which is a hereditary variant, is exceptionally high and approximately one third of the population are carriers. APOE4 is a risk factor of both cardiovascular diseases and memory disorders. However, research data on the association between a high intake of dietary cholesterol and the risk of memory disorders in this population group hasn't been available until now. The dietary habits of 2,497 men aged between 42 and 60 years and with no baseline diagnosis of a memory dis...

Prickly pear timber and the brown seaweed, generally often known as Peacocks tail, are a standard sight within the Mediterranean. Credit score: Stephanie Ghio Alzheimer's and Parkinson's illness are basic age-related problems characterised by the buildup of sticky protein clumps that over time injury the nervous system to erode mobility or reminiscence. The human struggling they trigger, in addition to the pressure on healthcare, are monumental. However there may be hope on the horizon. Chemical substances extracted from the prickly pear and brown seaweed, two ubiquitous Mediterranean vegetation, have been elevated to potential drug candidates to fight the neurodegenerative illness, in accordance with analysis by scientists from the College of Malta and the  Centre Nationwide de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS/College of Bordeaux). "We...

The findings, published in the  Journal of Alzheimer's Disease , shed new light on the relationship between genes, lifestyle risk factors and dementia. Researchers, who tracked participants in the Canadian Study of Health and Aging, found that while carriers of a variant of the 'apolipoprotein E' genotype are more likely to develop dementia, inactivity dramatically increases the risk for non-carriers. "The important message here is that being inactive may completely negate the protective effects of a healthy set of genes," says Jennifer Heisz, an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University and co-author of the study. "Given that most individuals are not at genetic risk, physical exercise may be an effective prevention strategy, " she says. Approximately 47.5-million people worldwide are living with dementia . That number is expected to surge to 115.4 million by the year 2050. With no known cure, there is an ur...

"We hope that the future development of therapies aimed at preventing or removing the accumulation of aggregated proteins within the aging brain will lead to healthy lifestyles in the elderly by maintaining their cognitive capabilities," said Antonio Currais, Ph.D., a co-author of the work and senior research associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. "Our laboratory is very focused on developing therapies for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases by targeting pathological processes that occur with aging and that we believe are the primary cause of those diseases. This is in direct contrast to the pharmaceutical companies that have focused their drug discovery approaches on very rare genetic forms of these diseases , basically ignoring aging." In the review, scientists suggest that because nerve cells do not divide and cannot dilute out damaged proteins by distributing them between two new cells, the proteins accumul...

"While being an E4 carrier is the strongest risk factor to date of Alzheimer's dementia and cognitive decline in industrial populations, it is associated with greater cognitive performance in individuals facing a high parasite and pathogen load, suggesting advantages to the E4 allele under certain environmental conditions," said Benjamin C. Trumble, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. "The current mismatch between sedentary postindustrial lifestyles and active parasite-rich lifeways experienced throughout most of human history may be critical for understanding genetic risk for cognitive aging." Trumble and colleagues examined cognitive performance and parasite exposure data from a remote population of forager-horticulturalists in the Bolivian Amazon , called the Tsimane. The Tsimane experience high parasite loads,...

"Chicoric acid, a nutraceutical component of chicory, also exists extensively in Echinacea purpurea, lettuce, dandelion, and other edible plants and vegetables," said Xuebo Liu, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work at the College of Food Science and Engineering, Northwest A&F University, in Yangling, China. "Chicoric acid mitigated lipopolysaccharide-induced amyloidogenesis and memory impairment via inhibiting NF?B signal pathway, suggesting that chicoric acid supplementation might be a plausible therapeutic intervention for neuroinflammation-related diseases such as Alzheimer's disease." To reach their conclusions, Liu and colleagues used three groups of mice: a control group, a group that received lipopolysaccharide (LPS), and another group that received both LPS and chicoric acid (CA). Learning and memory capabilities were evaluated using two separate behavioral tests (Y-maze and Morris water maze) four hours after LPS injection. They found that t...