High cholesterol levels are considered to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease including stroke. Therefore, a number of cholesterol lowering drugs have been developed by pharmaceutical companies in recent years. One class of these drugs, statins, has been found to reduce the occurence rate of stroke and progression of Alzheimers disease when prophylactically administered.

In a recent paper reported in the Journal of Alzheimers Disease, Amalia Dolga and co-workers from the University of Groningen show that the statin lovastatin, in addition to lowering cholesterol, can also prevent nerve cells from dying in conditions that occur in Alzheimers disease. Amalia Dolga discovered a previously unknown cascade of cellular signals in nerve cells that are responsible for this neuroprotective mechanism. This is an important finding because in a number of diseases such as Alzheimers or Parkinsons, death of nerve cells is generally believed to be a major cause of the dramatic symptoms that we find in these diseases.

Amalia Dolga observed that statins stimulate nerve cells to produce a specific receptor molecule for a protein which plays a central role in the bodys immune response: Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha (TNF-). Prior studies conducted by Dr. Ulrich Eisels group in the Department of Molecular Neurobiology (headed by Prof. Paul Luiten) have demonstrated that this specific TNF- signaling pathway has a strong beneficial effect on nerve cells and can protect nerve cells against death. This finding now demonstrates that a widely given drug like a statin can activate this protective pathway.


Posted by: April    Source

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