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Available in 3 formats:
Audio MP3 - Download: $15
Audio Compact Disc: $15
Video of PowerPoints with Synchronized Audio - Download: $18
Duration: 1 hr 11 min
 Cholesterol, Statins and the Brain?
Stephanie Seneff, PhD
In this session, I will develop a theory that Alzheimer's risk is significantly increased by insufficient supply of cholesterol and fats to the brain. I will first describe all the ways in which cholesterol plays an important role in the proper functioning of neurons. I will then discuss the series of progessive stages of Alzheimer's, beginning with oxidative damage, followed by mitochondrial dysfunction, defective signal transmission, insulin resistance, amyloid-beta deposits, and ultimately apoptosis and cell death. I will end with a discussion of multiple biological effects of statin therapy that plausibly increase risk to Alzheimer's.
Stephanie Seneff, PhD received her Bachelor's degree in Biology with a minor in Food and Nutrition in 1968 from MIT. She received her Master's and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1979 and 1985, respectively, also from MIT. Since then, she has been a researcher at MIT, where she is currently a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a Principal Investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Throughout her career, Dr. Seneff has conducted research in diverse areas including human auditory modeling, spoken dialogue systems, natural language processing, human language acquisition, information retrieval and summarization, computational biology, and marine mammal socialization. She has published over 150 refereed articles on these subjects, and has been invited to give keynote speeches at several international conferences. She has also supervised numerous Master's and PhD theses at MIT. She 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 the first author of a paper on the metabolic syndrome which will appear in the journal, "Archives of Medical Science," and on two other papers on nutrition currently under review.
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