Or, is lack of fat damaging to our brain? I think yes, and yes.

Myelin is a layer of electrically insulating material that surrounds usually just the axon part of our neurons. The process of myelinating the neuron begins before birth and finishes usually by the time we can open our own bank account. The myelin sheath is the "white matter" of the brain.

Per Wiki:

"The main purpose of a myelin layer (or sheath) is to increase the speed at which impulses propagate along the myelinated fiber" (usually the axon).

PD is a SLOWNESS of movement....

Remember myelin is an electrical insulator...so not only does it speed up transmission of brain messages, it keeps the message being transmitted from getting garbled with other things going on in the brain. If I am sending a package down a chute and then the chute starts eroding, my package will not travel as fast AND it could get sidetracked (or lost entirely), or other packages could end in up in the chute my package is supposed to be in.

Isn't PD really a slowness and garbling of neuronal transmission? You WANT to get a cup of coffee, but your arm won't move, or it won't move fast enough. Your brain has no problem thinking the thought, it's the physical carrying out of that thought that is the problem.

And to link it further, guess what is the most critical component of myelin? Cholesterol. Without it, no myelin. Without enough of it, slowness. Guess what PWP are low in? Cholesterol. And not just little low, but a lot,. We were told our cholesterol was at "starvation" levels, whatever that means, and were so happy to hear that because we thought all it meant was that we'd never have a stroke. Ha.

No doubt we lose myelin as we age, which is why PD and Alz. and name-that-20th-Century-Western-disease used to be seen only in the elderly. But now that we have been slurping up sugars and carbs for the past few decades at an unprecedented rate and fats our ancestors ate without problem have been all but banned, the ages and percentages at which these illnesses are being seen has skyrocketed. I see it something like this:

No healthy fats = no cholesterol = no myelin = brain atrophy/slowness/loss of transmissions

So then the question is, can we myelinate neurons that don't have enough or any myelin sheath, and if we can do this, does our PD/Alz./demential/etc. get better?

And do we know that the "atrophy" seen in brain illnesses is really an actual loss of cells v. loss of myelin, which I would think is a completely different animal. That would mean our cells are there, struggling to function, but not dead.

What do you all think? And btw, I don't mean to make it sound like myelin is the only thing at issue in PD, just that it could be a big deal and I've not read anything about it ever. Seems like someone somewhere would have seen the stats showing PWP are uniformly low in cholesterol and thought: "why is that? what might the effect be of the human body not having enough cholesterol?"

FWIW, I think this explains quite a bit about how DBS helps PWP, even though no one has been willing to come out and say it.