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from the everything-eventually-kills-you dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
It has been accepted wisdom for many years that the more good cholesterol people have in their blood, the better. But the good cholesterol, also known as HDL, might not be as good as we think.
In any case, the results of a new study from the University of Copenhagen seriously contradict the assumption that high levels of HDL in the blood are only a good thing. The researchers have shown that people with extremely high levels of good cholesterol have a higher mortality rate than people with normal levels. For men with extremely high levels, the mortality rate was 106 per cent higher than for the normal group. For women with extremely high levels, the mortality rate was 68 per cent higher.
"These results radically change the way we understand 'good' cholesterol. Doctors like myself have been used to congratulating patients who had a very high level of HDL in their blood. But we should no longer do so, as this study shows a dramatically higher mortality rate," says Børge Nordestgaard, Professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine and one of the authors of the study.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:34AM (1 child)
Not just HDL, the typical Western diet has too much of everything. Fine-tuning one component is retarded. Skipping dessert isn't healthy when you're eating 2 mains with buttered bread and sweet potato fries, waffles and maple syrup to the side. Yeah I think it was the HDL, bro.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @02:27PM
I wish they'd stop making this stuff up. The amount of cholesterol a person eats has very little to do with how much you get in your blood stream and the amount you have in your bloodstream is a poor predictor of anything meaningful.
Cholesterol itself isn't usually an issue unless it's hanging out in the bloodstream long enough to get damaged or allowed to collect on the artery walls to the point where it starts to reduce the blood flow. Simply having high levels of cholesterol doesn't mean anything in particular for the average person.
Now if they establish a causal relationship between the cholesterol and the mortality rates and establish a plausible explanation, that would be something to take seriously. The only meaningful takeaway here is that you shouldn't be aiming for the highest possible levels of HDL. But, how many of those folks have high levels because they've been told to cut back massively on their LDLs or taken medications that reduce the LDLs without doing anything about the HDLS?