What I wrote about grapefruit and hypercholesterolemia is just good ol' basic pharmacology and physiology. I'm 18 years removed from school and treat children for a living and so my professional life has not intersected with the most current understanding of Alzheimers all that much.Can you expound to include cholesterol and the myelin sheath connection with Alzheimer's? I'm asking due to reading some unsubstantiated reporting of the need for cholesterol at some level to protect the myelin sheath which correlated to lowering the risk of Alzheimer's. Hard to figure out what is accurate and what is not these days. If not a-ok, figured you might have some insight.
I can say (and again this is just basic physiology and I have no knowledge of the veracity of the claims in question) the myelin sheath is dependent on cholesterol for its formation. People with a genetic predisposition for hypercholesterolemia usually make normal amounts of cholesterol in their livers and it's just not taken up by the peripheral cells. The HMG-CoA-reductase inhibitors attempt to reduce liver production of cholesterol even though it is typically normal because dietary restriction alone seems to do little - even normal amounts of liver-produced cholesterol is too much if you can't internalize it into the cell. What are the long-term effects of HMG-CoA-reductase inhibitors? No idea...my patients don't take them and I haven't read much about it since school