A team co-led by scientists at Scripps Research has used advanced imaging methods to reveal how the production of the Alzheimer’s-associated protein amyloid beta (Aβ) in the brain is tightly regulated by cholesterol.
Appearing on line Thursday ahead of print in the Aug. 17 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the scientists’ work advances understanding of how Alzheimer’s disease develops and underscores the long-underappreciated role of brain cholesterol. The findings also help explain why genetic studies link Alzheimer’s risk to a cholesterol-transporting protein called apolipoprotein E (apoE).
“We showed that cholesterol is acting essentially as a signal in neurons that determines how much Aβ gets made — and thus it should be unsurprising that apoE, which carries the cholesterol to neurons, influences Alzheimer’s risk,” says study co-senior author…
