Summary: In today’s podcast, I am presenting you the second episode of a special podcast series on Alzheimer’s disease. Stephanie Seneff, PhD of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is my featured guest on the Carbohydrates Can Kill podcast. Dr. Seneff is going to discuss the role of cholesterol in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. As I told you in Episode 84 of this podcast on January 18, 2012, there are studies on Alzheimer’s disease that report an inverse correlation between the value of total serum cholesterol and the severity of loss of cognitive functions. While we understand that an increase in VLDL and some subgroup of LDLs, as well as triglycerides is the risk factors for atherosclerosis and other diseases, we realize an increase in total serum cholesterol, which includes HDLs and some “healthy” LDLs, should not be a risk factor without further investigation. Despite some articles sponsored, by pharmaceutical companies, claim the benefit of statin drugs on dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, we cannot help but doubting about the mechanism behind the claim(s). I am going to ask Dr. Seneff more about the impact of cholesterol on the development of Alzheimer’s disease. I can sense how much you want to know about this disease. Let us start our interview with Dr. Seneff now! Dr. Stephanie Seneff’s Homepage: http://www.csail.mit.edu/user/1389 Order my book: Carbohydrates Can Kill. Want to support my campaign? Please click the “Donate” button in the right-hand column of this page. Contact Me About Stephanie Seneff, PhD Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has a Batchelor’s degree from MIT in biology with a minor in food and nutrition, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, also from MIT. Throughout her career, Dr. Seneff has conducted research in diverse areas, including human auditory modeling, spoken dialogue systems, natural language processing, information retrieval and summarization, and computational biology. She has published nearly 200 refereed articles in technical journals and conferences on these subjects, and has been invited to give several keynote speeches. Dr. Seneff has recently become interested in the effect of drugs and diet on health and nutrition, and she has written several essays on the web articulating her view on these topics. She is currently developing spoken dialogue systems to support intelligent search and summarization of vaccine adverse reaction reports and user-provided reviews of drug side effects. She is the first author of three papers published in 2011 in medical journals on theories proposing that a high-carbohydrate diet contributes to the metabolic syndrome, to Alzheimer’s disease, and to autism.
