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Just in case you harbored any
lingering doubts that too much cholesterol is bad for you, along
comes new research suggesting a link between
cholesterol and
Alzheimer’s disease. Some encouraging new
studies suggest
that statins, drugs that help lower LDL or “bad” cholesterol,
may also help slow mental decline in Alzheimer’s patients. It’s
not yet clear exactly how much benefit these drugs provide, or
whether they work best alone or in combination with traditional
Alzheimer’s drugs, but understanding this link may be an
important part of conquering Alzheimer’s disease.
So… does this mean that the
general public should rush to take statins as protection against
mental decline? Not so fast. The existing studies have
considered patients who already had Alzheimer’s; there’s no data
yet on whether statins prevent future cognitive decline in
people with high cholesterol, and no reason to believe that
otherwise healthy people – those with low cholesterol levels –
should start taking cholesterol drugs at all. Right now, the
best advice is that you’ll maximize your chances to avoid both
heart disease and Alzheimer’s by working to keep your LDL
cholesterol levels down.
Without turning to drugs,
there are other ways to boost brain power. In this issue, we
profile a man who
has trained himself to accomplish astounding feats of memory
magic, like memorizing decks of cards or pages of random
numbers. His performance is truly astonishing, and well beyond
what most of us mere mortals will ever achieve. But you may
find it comforting to learn that such “superpowered” memories
are made, not born. In principle, most ordinary people could
master the tricks and techniques needed to be a memory magician,
or even just to improve our ability to remember random
information like names and dates.
And finally, turning from
the magical to the mundane, our
inside feature
deals with
dêja vu, that
occasional funny feeling that you’ve lived through this exact
moment before. As our story explains, dêja vu is nothing more
than a minor malfunction of memory, more of a curiosity than a
cause for alarm. But understanding dêja vu is helping to give
scientists a better understanding of how normal memory works –
and why such minor memory malfunctions are a small price to pay
for the amazing powers of the human brain.
Sincerely,
Catherine E. Myers, Ph.D.
Editor-In-Chief, Memory
Loss and the Brain
-- Copyright © 2005 Memory Loss and the Brain |
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