Alcohol - LPS - Atherosclerosis Paradox

By Scott Needham
Posted in

An area of personal interest and research is the disease atherosclerosis. When entering claims into Research Analysis (RA) on the topic of atherosclerosis, I identified what appears to be a paradox. In this article, I will explore this paradox using RA and see if it can shed some light on the paradox and the value of RA as a tool for research.

Here is the paradox that I found (note endotoxin and lipopolysaccharide are synonymous in this analysis) :

  1. endotoxin in the blood increases atherosclerosis in several species [claim 1716, 1760]. 
  2. alcohol increases endotoxin in the blood in several species [claims 3922, 1407, 1607 1619, 3886] (1407,1607 should be merged)
  3. alcohol decreases atherosclerosis in several species [claims 1709, 2307, 2308, 3043]

The following image provides  an overview of the claims:

Figure 1: Diagram of the paradoxical claims. [create with RA graphing tool in next article version and explain how done]

As can be seen in the diagram, there are two paths from alcohol to atherosclerosis. One of these appears to decrease atherosclerosis and the other appears to increase it. This represents a contradiction.

Is this really a contradiction? How might it be resolved?:

In a series of short articles, I'll address some of these questions using the Research Analysis tools. The follow is a list of the articles - those without links are proposed articles.

Then we can look at some more detailed molecular biology questions like: