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London: The belief that raising high-density lipoprotein (HDL)
or the so-called “good” cholesterol helps lower your risks of
heart attack may be a myth, claims a study led by an
Indian-origin scientist.
The new study, which is an analysis of 20 past studies
involving nearly 21,000 heart attack cases, found that though
keeping lowdensity lipoprotein or LDL (also known as bad
cholesterol) under check is good for the heart, raising levels
of HDL may not have any impact on one’s heart disease risk.
The study, published in The Lancet, showed that people with
a genetically-programmed tendency for higher HDL cholesterol
concentrations didn’t have a lower susceptibility to heart
attack.
“These results show that some ways of raising HDL
cholesterol might not reduce risk of myocardial infarction
(heart attack) in human beings,” said lead study author Sekar
Kathiresan of Massachusetts General Hospital, Broad Institute,
and Harvard Medical School in the US. “Therefore, if an
intervention such as a drug raises HDL cholesterol, we cannot
automatically assume that risk of myocardial infarction will be
reduced,” he explained.
HDL cholesterol is known as “good” cholesterol because
higher concentrations have been associated with lower risk of
heart attacks in observational studies, but whether this
association is causal is uncertain.
While lowering low-density lipoprotein or LDL, or “bad”,
cholesterol decreases the risk of heart attack, it has not been
shown that raising HDL similarly reduces the risk of heart
attack.
The study, which involved 20,913 heart attack cases and
95,407 controls from 20 studies, showed that people with LIPG
396Ser allele did not have a lower susceptibility to heart
attack. |
