Main Category: Cholesterol
Also Included In: Statins; Stem Cell Research
Article Date: 25 Sep 2013 – 1:00 PDT
The UB researchers found that LDL cholesterol modulates the levels of stem cells that form neutrophils, monocytes and macrophages, the primary cell types involved in the formation of plaque and atherosclerosis.
University at Buffalo
Cimato adds that the degree of increased LDL cholesterol in mouse studies is much higher than what is found in patients who come to the hospital with a heart attack or stroke.
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Cimato explains that making the jump from rodents with very high LDL cholesterol to humans required some creative steps, such as the manipulation of the LDL cholesterol levels of subjects through the use of three different kinds of statins.
“This is especially true with cholesterol studies,” he says, “because mice used for atherosclerosis studies have very low total cholesterol levels at baseline. We feed them very high fat diets in order to study high cholesterol but it isn’t easy to interpret what the levels in mice will mean in humans and you don’t know if extrapolating to humans will be valid.”
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“We modeled the mechanism of how LDL cholesterol affects stem cell mobilization in humans,” says Cimato.
He notes that the finding about the importance of these stem cells in atherosclerosis could lead to the development of a useful therapy in combination with statins, or one that could be used in place of statins in individuals who cannot tolerate them.
University at Buffalo. “Stem cells play a key role in how ‘bad’ cholesterol causes atherosclerosis in humans.” Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 25 Sep. 2013. Web.
25 Sep. 2013. <http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/266509.php>
The next step, he says, is to find out if HSPCs, like LDL cholesterol levels, are connected to cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke.
“We’ve extrapolated to humans what other scientists previously found in mice about the interactions between LDL cholesterol and these HSPCs,” explains Cimato.
The study involved monitoring for about a year a dozen people without known coronary artery disease who were on the statins for two-week periods separated by one-month intervals when they were off the drugs.
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