Lowering Your Cholesterol May Reduce Your Risk Of This Dementia

Approximately 5.8 million Americans are now living with Alzheimer's disease, and this number could increase to around 14 million by 2050. With this form of dementia on the rise, the medical community is working diligently to find preventive treatments.

While there isn't one sole cause of Alzheimer's, researchers have found the condition is likely caused by a combination of genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors. While we can't do much about our genetics, eating a healthy diet and completing physical and mental exercises early in life are thought to help protect the brain down the line. And a new study published in JAMA Neurology1 just found another way to potentially reduce your risk of the disease: Keep your cholesterol in check.

The researchers sequenced genomes of 2,125 people, some of which had early-onset Alzheimer's. They found that about 10% of the early-onset Alzheimer's cases could be explained by APOE E4, a gene mutation that's known as the most significant genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. Another 3% could be attributed to gene variants commonly associated with early-onset Alzheimer's, but the rest could not be explained.

Therefore, they tested people's blood cholesterol levels and found that people who had high LDL levels were more likely to have early-onset Alzheimer's disease than those with lower LDL levels. Interestingly, this was the case even when they took genetics out of the equation.

Cholesterol gets a bad rep, but in reality, we need it to keep our cell structure in place (it also helps with digestion and making hormones). There are two types of cholesterol: HDL cholesterol, which actually helps the body remove LDL from the arteries. LDL is referred to as "bad cholesterol" because too much can cause a buildup of plaque on the walls of our blood vessels, which in time could lead to a heart attack.