Cholesterol—Good for the brain, bad for the heart

 Healthy brains need plenty of cholesterol for nerve cells to grow and work properly, but diabetes can reduce the amount of cholesterol in the brain, as a Joslin Diabetes Center team has demonstrated. Joslin researchers and their colleagues now have gone on to show that mice that are genetically modified to suppress cholesterol production in the brain show dramatic symptoms of neurological impairment . This finding may help to explain why the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease increases in diabetes, says Heather Ferris, M.D., Ph.D., a Joslin research associate and lead author on a paper about the work published in PNAS. 

Loss of astrocyte cholesterol synthesis disrupts neuronal function and alters whole-body metabolism PNAS