Mice that were fed a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol for nine
months developed a preliminary stage of the morbid irregularities that
form in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The study results,
published in a doctoral thesis from the Swedish medical university
Karolinska Institutet (KI), give some indications of how this difficult
to treat disease might one day be preventable.
Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, there being roughly
90,000 patients with the disease in Sweden today. The underlying causes
of Alzheimer’s disease are still something of a mystery, but there are
a number of known risk factors. The most common is a variant of a
certain gene that governs the production of apolipoprotein E, one of
the functions of which is to transport cholesterol. The gene variant is
called apoE4 and is found in 15-20 per cent of the population.
For her doctoral thesis, Susanne Akterin studied mice that had been
genetically modified to mimic the effects of apoE4 in humans. The mice
were then fed for nine months on a diet rich in fat, sugar and
cholesterol, representing the nutritional content of most fast food.
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