The Importance Of Cholesterol In The Human Brain.

We don’t really want to demonize it by calling it “good” or “bad”. It does have its place in the brain’s biochemistry.

The functions that cholesterol does play in the human body are many. We can see that cholesterol is an important component in the structure of the cell membrane. Every living cell in the human body requires cholesterol for its structure to behave in the ways that it ought to be behaving.

Of course, the human brain also comprises cells that do require cholesterol. In fact, the brain does also need cholesterol to create myelin sheaths. These myelin sheaths act as a form of protection for the nerve cells, in a similar way that electrical wires are covered by a layer of insulation to protect the wire from damage and to protect people from being electrocuted.

We can consider the population of these myelin sheaths in the form of a balance equation, much like how we can actually do a balance of the cholesterol in our body:

To be very simplistic, we can just think of it as an equilibrium process, where:

Formation-Destruction = Accumulation

The net result of the addition of new myelin sheaths (Formation) subtracted by the elimination of existing sheaths (Destruction) would tell us how much myelin has been Accumulated.

We wouldn’t want the destruction rate to be higher than the formation rate, of course — that’s going to cause a reduction of those myelin sheaths.

Unfortunately, we do know that there are autoimmune conditions where the immune system is (mistakenly) programmed to target and destroy those myelin sheaths — that condition is also commonly known as multiple sclerosis (MS).

MS can be extremely debilitating and paralysing, and there is unfortunately no known cure for it at the moment.

So we might come to the conclusion that MS patients should not go on cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins any time soon.

After all, statins do inhibit the synthesis of fresh cholesterol in the body, and those myelin sheaths are highly dependent on the presence of cholesterol for remyelination (also known as the synthesis of new myelin or the repair of damaged myelin).

However, there also may be other side questions, such as “do statins cause dementia?” — and that is a valid cause for concern as well.

But statins do cause issues with remyelination, that is for sure — and that is definitely a cause for concern. Because if myelin sheaths are heavily reliant on cholesterol, but the statin drug inhibits the synthesis of fresh cholesterol, then what can be done about remyelination if the cholesterol inhibition remains there?

Nothing much, really.

However, in an interesting twist, statins may actually help to reduce MS issues in ways that are not related to the cholesterol-lowering activity.

Though ideally, we’d want to skip the entire discussion about cholesterol. It’s not that fun to talk about, especially if there are other implications about heart attacks and strokes involved — and there always is a sense of doom and foreboding about having to die by a heart attack or a stroke at any time.

But yet, we do have to be clear that cholesterol is an absolutely necessary building block for the cells in our body — we need it for those cells to function properly. We also do need it for proper brain functions, include the activity of the dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitters.

And we also have to be clear that cholesterol is only a part of the problem in heart disease. How our immune system’s macrophages react towards the cholesterol is a more significant thing, to be perfectly honest!

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