Iron behaving badly: inappropriate iron chelation as a major contributor to the aetiology of vascular and other progressive inflammatory and degenerative diseases, by Douglas B Kell, BMC Medical Genomics2009

“...Cardiovascular diseases
It is well known that elevated iron stores can predispose to coronary artery disease and thence myocardial infarction. The 'iron hypothesis' of the benefits of some iron depletion due to menstruation was devised to account for the lowering of heart-disease risk in young women (that disappears in those post-menopause) and was proposed by Jerome Sullivan in 1981 [695, 696, 697, 698] (and see also [699, 700]). (In this sense, the lack of menstruation during pregnancy would predispose to a comparative abundance of iron, as is indeed found – see above.) It is of particular interest that the well-known adverse vascular effects of homocysteine (in inhibiting flow-mediated dilatation) are in fact iron-dependent [701, 702, 703], and that reducing homocysteine (e.g. by folate supplementation) in the absence of lowering iron has shown no clinical benefit to date [704], thereby suggestion iron mediation. By contrast, iron stores represent an established risk factor for cardiovascular disease...”

“...Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other major neurodegenerative diseases

Oxidative stress and inflammation are early events of neurodegenerative diseases ....such as Alzheimer's disease..., where plaque formation precedes neurodegeneration... Iron (and in some cases copper) is also strongly implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases....
Indeed Thompson and colleagues comment ... that "The underlying pathogenic event in oxidative stress is cellular iron mismanagement" and stress that "Multiple lines of evidence implicate redox-active transition metals, such as iron and copper, as mediators of oxidative stress and ROS production in neurodegenerative diseases". There is also ample evidence for its presence in the plaques characteristic of Alzheimer's disease ... just as in those of atherosclerosis (see above). Note too that iron can catalyse the oxidation of dopamine to a quinine form that can bind covalently to and then aggregate proteins.... Kostoff... has used a very interesting literature-based discovery approach to highlight the role of oxidative stress in the development of Parkinson's disease.
Other papers highlight the role of iron in multiple sclerosis ... and in prion diseases.... However, a particularly clear example of iron-mediated neurodegeneration is given by the sequelae consequent upon lesions in a protein known as frataxin involved in the disease Friedreich's ataxia (FA)....”
read more/full paper: http://bmcmedgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1755-8794-2-2