Cornelis de Langen

Cornelis Douwe de Langen (10 September 1887, Groningen - 12 April 1967, Zeist) was a Dutch physician (internist). He spent substantial part of his career in Java where he discovered the correlation between nutritional cholesterol intake and incidence of gallstones, arteriosclerosis and other "Western diseases".

Cornelis de Langen was born in 1887 and died in 1967.

De Langen's main contribution is the discovery of the correlation between diet poor in cholesterol and lipids (and meat) in general and (very low) incidence of gallstones, cardiovascular disease and other Western diseases in Javanese population in the first half of the 20th century. He reported on his findings at the conference of the International Society of Geographic Pathology in 1935. His observation was made on patients admitted to the municipal hospital in Jakarta. Consequently, he studied this phenomenon in defined populations outside hospital. He hypothesized that the traditional Javanese diet, very poor in cholesterol and other lipids, was associated with low level of blood cholesterol as well as incidence of the cardiovascular disease, while the prevalence of CVD in Europeans in Java, living on the Western diet, was significantly higher. De Langen's colleague Isidor Snapper made similar observation in North China in 1940. Since de Langen published his results only in Dutch, his work remained unknown to most of the international scientific community.

De Langen became correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1929 and resigned in 1935. He was readmitted as member in 1950.

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