Dietary fats and the risk of incident Alzheimer disease.
"Persons in the upper fifth of saturated-fat intake had 2.2 times the risk of incident Alzheimer disease compared with persons in the lowest fifth in a multivariable model adjusted for age, sex, race, education, and apolipoprotein E epsilon4 allele status (95% confidence interval, 1.1-4.7)."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12580703
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Food combination and Alzheimer disease risk: a protective diet.
"RESULTS: Two hundred fifty-three subjects developed AD during a follow-up of 3.9 years. We identified a dietary pattern (DP) strongly associated with lower AD risk: compared with subjects in the lowest tertile of adherence to this pattern, the AD hazard ratio (95% confidence interval) for subjects in the highest DP tertile was 0.62 (0.43-0.89) after multivariable adjustment (P for trend = .01). This DP was characterized by higher intakes of salad dressing, nuts, fish, tomatoes, poultry, cruciferous vegetables, fruits, and dark and green leafy vegetables and a lower intake of high-fat dairy products, red meat, organ meat, and butter."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20385883
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Alzheimer's disease: the cholesterol connection
"A hallmark of all forms of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is an abnormal accumulation of B-amyloid protein (AB) in specific brain regions. Both the generation and clearance of AB are regulated by cholesterol. Elevated cholesterol levels increase AB in cellular and most animal models of AD, and drugs that inhibit cholesterol synthesis lower AB in these models...The identification of a variant of the Apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene as a major genetic risk factor for AD is also consistent with a role for cholesterol in the pathogenesis of AD."
http://www2.massgeneral.org/neurology/kovacs/publications/pdf/NN_AD_cholesterol_03.pdf
Since the most effective way to raise cholesterol is by consuming saturated fat, it is not surprising that saturated fat would be associated with increased Alzheimer's disease. BTW, Asian countries that consume a higher percentage of carbohydrates and a lower percentage of saturated fat than Americans have a lower rate of Alzheimer's than Americans. BTW, the apoe4 gene that increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease also raises cholesterol levels.
