SPEAKER DETAILS
LESLIE KLEVAY, MD, SD
Leslie M. Klevay, MD, SD in Hyg., has degrees from the University of Wisconsin and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has published more than two hundred articles in books and more than ninety different scientific journals. He has lectured widely both in the U.S. and abroad. He has taught at four universities, most recently the University of North Dakota where he is emeritus professor of internal medicine. He has been elected a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society of Nutrition for outstanding research. His unprecedented discovery that copper deficiency increases cholesterol was awarded a Citation Classic. He and Harold H. Sandstead, MD, organized the metabolic unit of the Human Nutrition Research Center of the USDA where they studied trace element metabolism in people.
PRESENTATIOns
ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE: THE COPPER DEFICIENCY THEORY
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27
Inspired by the now well-known protective effect of hard drinking water on heart disease, Leslie Klevay began to study trace elements and discovered fifty years ago that rats deficient in copper have very high cholesterol. This discovery prompted a search for characteristics of animals deficient in copper plus a search for relationships between copper metabolism and heart disease. At least eighty anatomical, chemical and physiological similarities between people with ischemic heart disease and animals deficient in copper have been found. Hypercholesterolemia, electrocardiographic abnormalities, glucose intolerance, hypertension and high uric acid are the most important. The copper deficiency theory is the simplest and most general theory of ischemic heart disease because it encompasses the theories of Barker (small babies), McCully (homocysteine) and Sullivan (iron overload). Small babies often are born before maternal metabolism supplements them with copper. Copper supplementation lowered plasma homocysteine in men. Excess iron can interfere with copper utilization.