Supposedly you want your HDL cholesterol level to be high
and your LDL cholesterol level to be low.
HDL is supposedly the “good cholesterol” and LDL is the “bad
cholesterol.” Doctors knock themselves out trying to raise their patients’ HDL
levels and lower their LDL levels. This is looking to be misguided (as I’ve
said all along). A recent study in the European Heart Journal followed more
than 116,000 men and women for an average of six years. They found that men
with an HDL level of 73 milligrams per deciliter had the lowest all-cause
mortality; those with a level of 97 to 115 had a 36 percent increase risk for
death. That is, those with the lower level were less likely to die than those
with the higher level. This is the reverse of what we’ve been told (although if
your HDL is very low—under 39—that’s not a good thing either).
LDL
cholesterol is supposedly the “bad” cholesterol. In a systematic review of
studies that looked at mortality of people over 60 found an inverse
relationship between the level of LDL cholesterol and mortality. “We didn´t
find any study having shown that high LDL-cholesterol is a risk factor for
elderly people.” In other words, those people over 60 with high LDL
lived the longest.
Well, some studies have shown you can prolong your life by
taking statin drugs—by about four days.
Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark did a systematic review of
all statin trials that compared statin treatment to a placebo. For people who
were treated as a preventive measure, the average postponement of death was 3.2
days; for people who had already had a heart attack, death was postponed by an
average of 4.1 days. The trial that showed the longest postponement of death,
that postponement was 27 days. In the trial with the worst outcome, life was shortened by an average of 10 days.
Just forget the whole business and don’t worry about your
cholesterol.For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.
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