The article that we hope you will like has dual structure. First, it is  a sounding board, a commentary or a teaching essay. It provides our viewpoint on Alzheimer's pathogenesis and represents our new, i.e. not reported previously, interpretation of previously published data. As such this contribution was presented as teaching poster and press book lay language article at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting 2001 in San Diego, CA, November 11-15, 2001.

The novelty of our interpretation of the role of cholesterol in Alzheimer's disease was first encouraged in December 2000 when The Lancet welcomed us to submit a hypothesis manuscript. The later version of the Lancet hypothesis under our commentary/viewpoint definition was submitted to Nature Medicine, Trends in Neurosciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Neuron, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Cell Biology and Nature Review Neurosciences. Lately, based on one reviewer comment, the manuscript was rejected from Archives of Neurology where it was submitted by invitation. During the presubmission inquiry with The British Medical Journal (BMJ) editorial staff kindly suggested us to publish this article in Clin Med Health Res. To adapt the article for Clin Med  we enhanced it with original data. These data (representing another article part) awaited publication but were reported last year as scientific session and lay language press book article at the Society for Neuroscience Annual meeting 2000, November 5, 2000, New Orleans, LA.

Please note that top biomedical journals found the article interesting but refused to accomodate it on their pages. "We certainly like to publish articles that, as yours, aim to present a novel and alternative view on a given topic" - wrote to us editor of one premier neuroscience journal, but added that he is "hesitant to publish ...non-mainstream article on the topic until we have covered the current trends on Alzheimer's research." Another very high impact medical journal wrote about the manuscript in the rejection letter dated August 1, 2001: "We thought that it was interesting, but that its focus, content, and interest to our readers were such that it would not meet our needs." 

Well. Thanks to technology and wonderful BMJ.COM venture we have an opportunity to take responsibility in presenting here our own Alzheimer's trend and let you decide yourself whether this article is interesting and important or not. If you like or dislike the article or would like to add few responsible words, please do so, at the exclusive ClinMed web site. Please don't be hesitant. Be sure that your post-publication peer review or commentary response will be published and will significantly contribute to the discussion on the role of cholesterol in neurodegeneration, brain function, synaptic plasticity, tau and amyloid beta neurochemistry and Alzheimer's disease. The BMJ commitment to provide free and unlimited discussion forum through eResponses on any article that appear in BMJ  journals reserves the trust and was verified by us previously.

We believe that we did a good job to deliver to you professionally looking web html-enhanced and Acrobat .PDF article versions. We hope that you will enjoy reading the article and will find it helpful in your scientific endeavors.
 
 

With best regards from the Holy Land,

Alexei R. Koudinov, MD, PhD

Natalia V. Koudinova, MD, PhD

Post Scriptum
December 18, 2001 note: We are happy to let you know that HTML version of the paper had 500 readers during first three weeks since it was published on November 27, 2001