A crash has just begun in Ireland!

Fasten your belts and brace for a crash landing!

Today's Irish Independent article :

The publication of the two reports coincide with the news that at least €10bn has been withdrawn from Ireland in the past week as the impact on Ireland's financial reputation emerges.

If the outflow of funds has begun as I wrote in my blog 3 months ago, if that is 10Beu/week then it is a matter of a few weeks before all Irish banks will run out of cash and the gov will have to either fork out that cash (if it has got any left), renege on the promise or let them all fail! In my back of the envelope estimate there is only 20-40Beu of cash reserves left with the Irish banks, perhaps even less!

Updated 19/04/2009

I was off by 2 weeks. The banks ran out of cash after 6 weeks instead of 4 as I thought. Irish government managed to save their bacon, for the time being by injecting 90B eu of fresh money into their system, in the first week of April. Irish banks ONE : Irish taxpayers ZERO, everybody happy, all love! This should last them about 3 more months assuming that the cash bleed rate stays the same. We should expect some more interesting news in the middle of the summer. So far so good, go to a pub, drink beer...

It's the glucose, stupid!

The subject line is borrowed from Barry Groves' blog, a must-read. He is pointing out an important paper, published recently:

"Systemic Correlates of Angiographic Coronary Artery Disease" by José Pedro L. Nunes, João Carlos Silva

It is worth pointing out, not surprising to most of us heretics, that they found no correlation whatsoever of coronary arterial disease with the lipids:

Quote:

Lipids accumulate in arterial walls in atherosclerosis. In the present study, we could find no evidence of an association between lipid fractions and CADB. Most patients were treated with lipid-lowering drugs, and this may be one of the reasons behind these negative findings, particularly in what concerns LDL cholesterol. In the present study, HDL cholesterol levels were also not correlated to CADB, although previous studies have been shown HDL to be negatively associated with the importance of coronary artery disease, whereas no such relation was noted involving LDL cholesterol [16]–[17].

What shouldn't be surprising either, is that high glucose and high insulin (presumed) were significantly correlated, quote:

In the context of the present investigation, one may speculate that higher plasma glucose, probably in the presence of elevated plasma insulin, could be associated to a growth-stimulating effect on atherosclerotic lesions, perhaps involving magnesium as a cofactor for insulin-stimulated growth.

Stan (Heretic)

P.S.

[geek warning level = high]

What also caught my attention is the reference #23:

FEBS Lett. 1997 Nov 17;417(3):283-6. "Inhibition of MAP kinase blocks insulin-mediated DNA synthesis and transcriptional activation of c-fos by Elk-1 in vascular smooth muscle cells.",
Xi XP, Graf K, Goetze S, Hsueh WA, Law RE.

After a brief look, it seems to tie with Dr. Kwasniewski's postulated Pentose Phosphate Pathway (Pentose Shunt). If that's the case it would be the first confirmation. It requires some more digging, might come back to it.

Update (24-May-09)

Adding some references for the record:

R.W. Stout, The Lancet, 1968,1969
Paper 1 and 2





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Alzheimer's 'is brain diabetes'

c a r b o h y d r a t e s c a r b o h y d r a t e s c a r b o h y d r a t e s c a r b o h y d r a t e s

BBC Health article

Quotes:

Treating Alzheimer's with the hormone insulin, or with drugs to boost its effect, may help patients, they claim.
...

The latest study, joint research between Northwestern University in the US and the University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, looked at the effects of insulin on proteins called ADDLs, which build up in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and cause damage. They took neurons - brain cells - from the hippocampus, a part of the brain with a pivotal role in memory formation. These were treated with insulin and a drug called rosiglitazone, given to type II diabetics to increase the effect of the hormone on cells. After this, the cells were far less susceptible to damage when exposed to ADDLs, suggesting that insulin was capable of blocking their effects.

Surely it must be all that fat, lack of exercizing and "bad" genes...

c a r b o h y d r a t e s c a r b o h y d r a t e s c a r b o h y d r a t e s c a r b o h y d r a t e s