PHILADELPHIA: A PLOS One study has found a high-fat oriented dietary intervention to be a major factor in the genetic expression of a specific set of proteins that transport fats in the body called Apolipoproteins or Apo’s.
Researchers focused on a particular type of Apolipoprotein, ApoE, which has a known link with Alzheimer’s disease.
There are three isoforms of ApoE: E2, E3 and E4, and it’s the combination of the two copies inherited from our mother and father which determines the risk profile for the degenerative disease.
ApoE is a protein, i.e., a sequence of amino acids, and its specific composition is dictated by corresponding DNA on a given gene. Alterations in the DNA code presumably stop the transcribed ApoE-4 protein performing its biological roles as efficiently as the other alleles.
Possession of the defective ApoE-4 allele of Apolipoprotein E over the neutral version ApoE-3 has been linked to higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease. One study showed that carriers of this genotype have up to 20 times the risk of developing Alzheimers disease than non-carriers…