X-Message-Number: 19977 From: Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2002 21:11:24 EDT Subject: Statins for life extension? --part1_ca.109cbc67.2aa5663c_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Statins are frequently in the news of late. Given to lower cholesterol, they seemed to work at that and also to lower incidence of heart attack and stroke. Then it was found they also lowered Alzheimer's, by 70%, I think. Most recently it was reported that inflamation was the main precursor to heart attack and there would soon be a $10 blood test for indicators of inflamation; and statins seemed to lower inflamation so they would be given if indicated. And of course it's known that NSAIDS lower Alzheimers by 70% or so, and thought that inflamation may play a large role in Alzheimer's and NSAIDs may work by lowering inflamation. So, statins-lower inflamation-lower Alzheimer's would make sense. (Forgive me, I'm writing from memory of newspaper articles here and haven't read any original papers except the Dutch study on NSAIDs/Alzheimers. But I believe all these things have been reported per this summary.) My question is, have there been studies, in flies, mammals or anything else, on statins for life extension? Like aspirin they seem to be good for a number of ailments without anyone quite knowing why. But as they do seem to be good for several important things, it might be interesting to feed them to worms etc. and just see what happens. Or has this been tried? Alan Mole --part1_ca.109cbc67.2aa5663c_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19977