According to this increased copper from multi-vitamins can lead to Alzheimers. Any thoughts on this?
Just take shitloads of Zinc to stop your body absorbing the copper.
Copper, fat, and estrogen levels are generally directly related. They all may depress thyroid function and cortisol-adrenal function. If they both get too low they may cause aberations in health which may lead to said diseases in the article listed above. If you purposefully cut out these substances when you are in fact low in them it’ll exacerbate the risk factor of a whole wack of other problems, namely hyperthyroidism, hypercortisolemia, aneurisms, heart attacks, etc…
So… the take home message is, don’t cut them out if you don’t know you’re high in them. That’s also why I’m not a fan of people taking ZMA indescriminantly. It can worsen a copper deficiency in someone already predisposed to it causing further health problems down the road.
You have to take this stuff with a huge grain of salt.
Somewhere, underneath it all, are some underlying processes that aren’t fully understood. So, we take shots in the dark and see what some statistics say, but they are nowhere near the whole picture.
They have however, recently, shown that aging decreases the expression of a certain protein which cleans materials from the brain before it gets converted into amyloids.
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LA JOLLA, CA - Like most neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer’s disease usually appears late in life, raising the question of whether it is a disastrous consequence of aging or if the toxic protein aggregates that cause the disease simply take a long time to form.
Now, a collaboration between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Scripps Research Institute shows that aging is what’s critical. Harmful beta amyloid aggregates accumulate when aging impedes two molecular clean-up crews from getting rid of these toxic species.
This finding opens the door for development of drugs preventing build-up of toxic protein aggregates in the brain. The study appears in the Aug. 10 issue of Science Express, the advanced online edition of the journal Science.
“Aging is the most important risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Huntington’s disease,” says senior author Andrew Dillin, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Salk Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory. “Our study revealed that the age onset of these diseases is not simply a matter of time but that the aging process plays an active role in controlling the onset of toxicity,” he explains.
Beta amyloid production occurs in all brains, but healthy cells clear away excess amounts. Brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, on the other hand, are unable to control beta amyloid accumulation. For years, scientists have scrambled to find out why.
To answer this vexing question, Dillin analyzed protein aggregation in the roundworm, a streamlined organism that, like mammals, uses the insulin/IGF-1 pathway to control lifespan but can be rapidly manipulated genetically. Dillin used roundworms that produce human beta amyloid peptide in body wall muscles. As the worms aged, the protein formed toxic aggregates causing paralysis.
Then researchers experimentally decelerated aging in engineered worms by lowering activity of the insulin/IGF-1 pathway and asked whether it was simply the passage of time–not aging per se–that favored protein aggregation. It wasn’t: chronologically “old” worms crawled around happily, while counterparts whose insulin/IGF-1 pathway was normal could only helplessly wriggle their heads.
However, close inspection of the data revealed a surprise: “Worms with reduced insulin signaling seemed perfectly fine although they had high molecular weight aggregates, while worms with an accelerated aging program were extremely sensitive to the toxic effects of beta amyloid but we couldn’t detect any large fibrils,” explains postdoctoral researcher and co-lead author Ehud Cohen, Ph.D.
Intrigued, Dillin turned to an expert on beta amyloid biochemistry, Jeffery Kelly, Ph.D., a professor of chemistry at Scripps and a member of its Skaggs Institute of Chemical Biology.
Together they found that cells use an unexpected two-pronged strategy to rid themselves of harmful aggregates. Kelly explains, “One pathway disaggregated beta amyloid fibrils, while the other actively packed them into high molecular weight aggregates. But the latter only kicks in when the cell is left with no other options.”
The surprise was that very high molecular weight species were actually less toxic than smaller aggregates. “For a long time large protein aggregates were considered the toxic species,” explains Cohen. “The fact that cells protect themselves by temporarily storing small fibrils as high molecular weight aggregates marks a clear paradigm shift.”
Two proteins controlled by insulin/IGF-1 signaling orchestrate detoxification–HSF-1, which takes care of aggregate break-down, and DAF-16, which mediates formation of safer, super-sized aggregates as debris accumulates. “We assumed that DAF-16 and HSF-1 would do the same job, but they don’t. This is extremely exciting because it gives us two unique opportunities to attenuate beta amyloid-mediated toxicity by manipulating the activity of these factors,” says Dillin.
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