For years, health experts have warned us that too much cholesterol is very bad for our heart and cardiovascular system. However, little have they explained about the damage it can also do to our brain.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to various studies, high cholesterol levels can cause memory loss, brain inflammation and other cognitive problems associated with\u00a0neurodegenerative diseases, such as\u00a0Alzheimer’s<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The mechanisms that explain how this happens are becoming increasingly clear thanks to a line of research that has been building for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of its key moments was when\u00a0Ingemar Bj\u00f6rkhem<\/a>, a physician and researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, demonstrated that\u00a0circulating cholesterol\u00a0can indeed cross the blood-brain barrier<\/strong> \u2013the structure that regulates the passage of substances and molecules from the blood into the brain. To do so, however, it must first be broken down into a smaller version called 27-hydroxycholesterol (27-OH).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once defined, researchers such as\u00a0\u00c1ngel Cedazo Minguez<\/a>, also at Karolinska, continued to piece together the puzzle in order to understand how the abundance of this compound relates to neurodegeneration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Then I came in, trying to find the molecular mechanisms through which this excess harms the brain,” says\u00a0Ra\u00fal Loera<\/a>, a research professor at the\u00a0School of Medicine and Health Sciences<\/a>\u00a0(EMCS), Chihuahua Campus, of the Tecnol\u00f3gico de Monterrey, who completed his postdoctoral research at Karolinska.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Loera has worked with transgenic animal models, cell cultures, and human studies to discover what happens to brain cells when there are large amounts of this lipid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n