[email hidden] wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:For ZEE: Great News!
For the reat of the world: Fribble.(Sorry for not trimming the crosspost.)
L.
(Zee) said:Your thoughts, gentlemen? Zee
From Uffe Ravnskov MD PhD:
An article published in QJM 2003:
High cholesterol may protect against infections and atherosclerosis
http://qjmed.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/full/96/12/927?ijkey=172mwKXqzgmtE&keytype=refAnd a book excerpt on the same subject.
http://www.westonaprice.org/know_your_fats/benefits_cholest.htm#ravnskovomeThe benefits of high cholesterol
By Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD
People with high cholesterol live the longest. This statement seems so
incredible that it takes a long time to clear one´s brainwashed mind
to fully understand its importance. Yet the fact that people with high
cholesterol live the longest emerges clearly from many scientific
papers. Consider the finding of Dr. Harlan Krumholz of the Department
of Cardiovascular Medicine at Yale University, who reported in 1994
that old people with low cholesterol died twice as often from a heart
attack as did old people with a high cholesterol.1 Supporters of the
cholesterol campaign consistently ignore his observation, or consider
it as a rare exception, produced by chance among a huge number of
studies finding the opposite.But it is not an exception; there are now a large number of findings
that contradict the lipid hypothesis. To be more specific, most
studies of old people have shown that high cholesterol is not a risk
factor for coronary heart disease. This was the result of my search in
the Medline database for studies addressing that question.2Eleven
studies of old people came up with that result, and a further seven
studies found that high cholesterol did not predict all-cause
mortality either.Now consider that more than 90 % of all cardiovascular disease is seen
in people above age 60 also and that almost all studies have found
that high cholesterol is not a risk factor for women.2 This means that
high cholesterol is only a risk factor for less than 5 % of those who
die from a heart attack.But there is more comfort for those who have high cholesterol; six of
the studies found that total mortality was inversely associated with
either total or LDL-cholesterol, or both. This means that it is
actually much better to have high than to have low cholesterol if you
want to live to be very old.High Cholesterol Protects Against Infection
Many studies have found that low cholesterol is in certain respects
worse than high cholesterol. For instance, in 19 large studies of more
than 68,000 deaths, reviewed by Professor David R. Jacobs and his
co-workers from the Division of Epidemiology at the University of
Minnesota, low cholesterol predicted an increased risk of dying from
gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases.3Most gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases have an infectious
origin. Therefore, a relevant question is whether it is the infection
that lowers cholesterol or the low cholesterol that predisposes to
infection? To answer this question Professor Jacobs and his group,
together with Dr. Carlos Iribarren, followed more than 100,000 healthy
individuals in the San Francisco area for fifteen years. At the end of
the study those who had low cholesterol at the start of the study had
more often been admitted to the hospital because of an infectious
disease.4,5 This finding cannot be explained away with the argument
that the infection had caused cholesterol to go down, because how
could low cholesterol, recorded when these people were without any
evidence of infection, be caused by a disease they had not yet
encountered? Isn´t it more likely that low cholesterol in some way
made them more vulnerable to infection, or that high cholesterol
protected those who did not become infected? Much evidence exists to
support that interpretation.Low Cholesterol and HIV/AIDS
Young, unmarried men with a previous sexually transmitted disease or
liver disease run a much greater risk of becoming infected with HIV
virus than other people. The Minnesota researchers, now led by Dr. Ami
Claxton, followed such individuals for 7-8 years. After having
excluded those who became HIV-positive during the first four years,
they ended up with a group of 2446 men. At the end of the study, 140
of these people tested positive for HIV; those who had low cholesterol
at the beginning of the study were twice as likely to test postitive
for HIV compared with those with the highest cholesterol.6Similar results come from a study of the MRFIT screenees, including
more than 300,000 young and middle-aged men, which found that 16 years
after the first cholesterol analysis the number of men whose
cholesterol was lower than 160 and who had died from AIDS was four
times higher than the number of men who had died from AIDS with a
cholesterol above 240.7Cholesterol and Chronic Heart Failure
Heart disease may lead to a weakening of the heart muscle. A weak
heart means that less blood and therefore less oxygen is delivered to
the arteries. To compensate for the decreased power, the heart beat
goes up, but in severe heart failure this is not sufficient. Patients
with severe heart failure become short of breath because too little
oxygen is delivered to the tissues, the pressure in their veins
increases because the heart cannot deliver the blood away from the
heart with sufficient power, and they become edematous, meaning that
fluid accumulates in the legs and in serious cases also in the lungs
and other parts of the body. This condition is called congestive or
chronic heart failure.There are many indications that bacteria or other microorganisms play
an important role in chronic heart failure. For instance, patients
with severe chronic heart failure have high levels of endotoxin and
various types of cytokines in their blood. Endotoxin, also named
lipopolysaccharide, is the most toxic substance produced by
Gram-negative bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Klebsiella,
Salmonella, Serratia and Pseudomonas. Cytokines are hormones secreted
by white blood cells in their battle with microorganisms; high levels
of cytokines in the blood indicate that inflammatory processes are
going on somewhere in the body.The role of infections in chronic heart failure has been studied by
Dr. Mathias Rauchhaus and his team at the Medical Department,
Martin-Luther-University in Halle, Germany (Universitätsklinik und
Poliklinik für Innere Medizin III, Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle).
They found that the strongest predictor of death for patients with
chronic heart failure was the concentration of cytokines in the blood,
in particular in patients with heart failure due to coronary heart
disease.8 To explain their finding they suggested that bacteria from
the gut may more easily penetrate into the tissues when the pressure
in the abdominal veins is increased because of heart failure. In
accordance with this theory, they found more endotoxin in the blood of
patients with congestive heart failure and edema than in patients with
non-congestive heart failure without edema, and endotoxin
concentrations decreased significantly when the heart's function was
improved by medical treatment.9A simple way to test the functional state of the immune system is to
inject antigens from microorganisms that most people have been exposed
to, under the skin. If the immune system is normal, an induration
(hard spot) will appear about 48 hours later at the place of the
injection. If the induration is very small, with a diameter of less
than a few millimeters, this indicates the presence of "anergy," a
reduction in or failure of response to recognize antigens. In
accordance, anergy has been found associated with an increased risk of
infection and mortality in healthy elderly individuals, in surgical
patients and in heart transplant patients.10Dr. Donna Vredevoe and her group from the School of Nursery and the
School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles tested
more than 200 patients with severe heart failure with five different
antigens and followed them for twelve months. The cause of heart
failure was coronary heart disease in half of them and other types of
heart disease (such as congenital or infectious valvular heart
disease, various cardiomyopathies and endocarditis) in the rest.
Almost half of all the patients were anergic, and those who were
anergic and had coronary heart disease had a much higher mortality
than the rest.10Now to the salient point: to their surprise the researchers found that
mortality was higher, not only in the patients with anergy, but also
in the patients with the lowest lipid values, including total
cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and HDL-cholesterol as well as
triglycerides.The latter finding was confirmed by Dr. Rauchhaus, this time in
co-operation with researchers at several German and British university
hospitals. They found that the risk of dying for patients with chronic
heart failure was strongly and inversely associated with total
cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and also triglycerides; those with high
lipid values lived much longer than those with low values.11,12Other researchers have made similar observations. The largest study
has been performed by Professor Gregg C. Fonorow and his team at the
UCLA Department of Medicine and Cardiomyopathy Center in Los
Angeles.13 The study, led by Dr. Tamara Horwich, included more than a
thousand patients with severe heart failure. After five years 62
percent of the patients with cholesterol below 129 mg/l had died, but
only half as many of the patients with cholesterol above 223 mg/l.When proponents of the cholesterol hypothesis are confronted with
findings showing a bad outcome associated with low cholesterol?and
there are many such observations?they usually argue that severely ill
patients are often malnourished, and malnourishment is therefore said
to cause low cholesterol. However, the mortality of the patients in
this study was independent of their degree of nourishment; low
cholesterol predicted early mortality whether the patients were
malnourished or not.Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome
As discussed in The Cholesterol Myths (see sidebar), much evidence
supports the theory that people born with very high cholesterol,
so-called familial hypercholesterolemia, are protected against
infection. But if inborn high cholesterol protects against infections,
inborn low cholesterol should have the opposite effect. Indeed, this
seems to be true.Children with the Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome produce very little
cholesterol because the enzyme that is necessary for the last step in
the body's synthesis of cholesterol does not function properly. Most
children with this syndrome are either stillborn or they die early
because of serious malformations of the central nervous system. Those
who survive are imbecile, they have extremely low cholesterol and
suffer from frequent and severe infections. However, if their diet is
supplemented with pure cholesterol or extra eggs, their cholesterol
goes up and their bouts of infection become less serious and less
frequent.14Laboratory Evidence
Laboratory studies are crucial for learning more about the mechanisms
by which the lipids exert their protective function. One of the first
to study this phenomenon was Dr Sucharit Bhakdi from the Institute of
Medical Microbiology, University of Giessen (Institut für Medizinsche
Mikrobiologie, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen), Germany along with
his team of researchers from various institutions in Germany and
Denmark.15Staphylococcus aureus a-toxin is the most toxic substance produced by
strains of the disease-promoting bacteria called staphylococci. It is
able to destroy a wide variety of human cells, including red blood
cells. For instance, if minute amounts of the toxin are added to a
test tube with red blood cells dissolved in 0.9 percent saline, the
blood is hemolyzed, that is the membranes of the red blood cells burst
and hemoglobin from the interior of the red blood cells leaks out into
the solvent. Dr. Bhakdi and his team mixed purified a-toxin with human
serum (not just the blood cells alone, but the cells and the fluid in
which the blood cells reside) and saw that 90 percent of its
hemolyzing effect disappeared. By various complicated methods they
identified the protective substance as LDL, the carrier of the
so-called bad cholesterol. In accordance, no hemolysis occurred when
they mixed a-toxin with purified human LDL, whereas HDL or other
plasma constituents were ineffective in this respect.Dr. [censored] Flegel and his co-workers at the Department of Transfusion
Medicine, University of Ulm, and the Institute of Immunology and
Genetics at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany
(DRK-Blutspendezentrale und Abteilung für Transfusionsmedizin,
Universität Ulm, und Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, Heidelberg)
studied endotoxin in another way.16 As mentioned, one of the effects
of endotoxin is that white blood cells are stimulated to produce
cytokines. The German researchers found that the cytokine-stimulating
effect of endotoxin on the white blood cells disappeared almost
completely if the endotoxin was mixed with human serum for 24 hours
before they added the white blood cells to the test tubes. In a
subsequent study17 they found that purified LDL from patients with
familial hypercholesterolemia had the same inhibitory effect as the
serum.LDL may not only bind and inactivate dangerous bacterial toxins; it
seems to have a direct beneficial influence on the immune system also,
possibly explaining the observed relationship between low cholesterol
and various chronic diseases. This was the starting point for a study
by Professor Matthew Muldoon and his team at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They studied healthy young and middle-aged
men and found that the total number of white blood cells and the
number of various types of white blood cells were significantly lower
in the men with LDL-cholesterol below 160 mg/dl (mean 88.3 mg/l),than
in men with LDL-cholesterol above 160 mg/l (mean 185.5 mg/l).18 The
researchers cautiously concluded that there were immune system
differences between men with low and high cholesterol, but that it was
too early to state whether these differences had any importance for
human health. Now, seven years later with many of the results
discussed here, we are allowed to state that the immune-supporting
properties of LDL-cholesterol do indeed play an important role in
human health.Animal Experiments
The immune systems in various mammals including human beings have many
similarities. Therefore, it is interesting to see what experiments
with rats and mice can tell us. Professor Kenneth Feingold at the
Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, and
his group have published several interesting results from such
research. In one of them they lowered LDL-cholesterol in rats by
giving them either a drug that prevents the liver from secreting