Heart Health Meets Mental Health: The Damage of Cholesterol

If you have high cholesterol, it may not just be your physical wellbeing, but also your mental health at stake. This is according to a study published in the online journal PLOS ONE, which found that people with raised cholesterol don’t just have an increased risk of heart disease – they may be more likely to develop dementia.

It has already been established that high levels of cholesterol are significantly linked to the brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Now, US scientists have discovered the reason which high cholesterol levels damages your brain, as well as your blood vessels. The researchers at the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome and University of Colorado found that cholesterol wreaks havoc on the orderly process of cell division. This insight was discovered when the team was investigating two much rarer disorders; Down Syndrome and Niemann Pick-C disease.

The researchers say that cholesterol, particularly in the ‘bad’ LDL form, causes your cells, as well as the cells of mice, to divide incorrectly and distribute their already-duplicated chromosomes unequally to the next generation. This means that your body accumulates defective cells with the wrong number of chromosomes, which, in turn, leads to an accumulation of the wrong number of genes. You’re meant to acquire two copies of each chromosome, and therefore two copies of each gene, but instead some cells acquire three copies and some only one.

When cells carry three copies of the chromosome, these are associated with the damaging protein amyloid, which occurs between nerve cells. You have amyloid plaques in your brain when your wellness is affected by Alzheimer’s. According to previous research, when you have high cholesterol levels, as defined by a reading of more than 5.8 mmol/L, you’re significantly more likely to have brain plaques than those with normal or lower cholesterol levels.

In this previous study, carried out by researchers from Japan’s Kyushu University, 86% of people with high cholesterol had brain plaques, compared with only 62 percent of people with low cholesterol levels. The researchers also used autopsies to look for tangles in the brain, which is also a known trademark sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Tangles are an accumulation of a protein called tau, which occurs inside nerve cells, but the researchers found no link between high cholesterol and the tangles that develop in the brain with Alzheimer’s disease. Still, there was a definite link with plaques.

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