Good Cholesterol Is Not As Good As We Think

People should have normal levels of good cholesterol and low levels of bad cholesterol.

A new study showed that if a person has high “good cholesterol” levels he still presents some risk compared to those who have low “bad cholesterol” levels. That means that it is more effective to lower the bad cholesterol than to raise the good one. These two types of cholesterol are HDL and LDL but are more known as the good one and the bad one.

Very high or low levels of HDL ( the good one) might raise the risk of heart diseases. Until now people believed that they should have high levels of HDL but this study showed that higher levels of HDL are not good. People should have normal levels of good cholesterol and low levels of bad cholesterol.

In order to lower the levels of bad cholesterol (LDL) people need to take some medications that contain statins. This treatment blocks the enzyme that produces cholesterol. The problem is that some people don’t respond to the treatment as expected and doctors started to think about a new way of helping people.

They wanted to see what happens if people produced more good cholesterol. Researchers believed that high levels of HDL could have the same effect as low levels of LDL. The study showed that it is not the case.

In order to conduct this study, researchers studied almost 640,000 people diagnosed with a cardiovascular condition in the past. These people were aged between 40 and 105. The average age was 57.2. All of these people were divided into groups so that researchers could study the effect of the bad and the good cholesterol.

People who had low levels of HDL had a bigger risk of having a heart disease. On the other hand, people who had higher levels of HDL than normal had a bigger risk of non-cardiovascular related deaths.

“The link between good cholesterol and heart disease is complex,” said lead author Dennis Ko, associate professor from the University of Toronto in Canada

Researchers were not able to establish the real connection between cholesterol and heart diseases but the findings show that there are some links. Levels of good cholesterol and bad cholesterol are all tied to the heart. They can either help it function or they can cause several problems.

Image source: Wikipedia

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Nancy Young

When I was younger I used to spend almost all of my free time playing computer games. My mom and dad would go mental over this. “You’re never going to do anything with your life if you are going to play games all day” they used to say. What was even more unusual was the fact that I played more games than most of the guys in my friend group. Looking back, I have to admit that I probably played a bit too much, but I also learned a lot of great things. When I turned 20 I decided that it was high-time to make some money of my own, but the only jobs I could get were that of waitress or cashier. How exciting. After several excruciating months of serving tables I had a great idea: since I love gaming so much, why don’t I write about it? That’s when I started doing small writing projects on Elance. Eventually, I got an offer for a part-time job. During that time I learned all about content marketing strategies and how search engines work. I started writing about various topics such as technology, health and lifestyle and discovered that I was actually good at it. On November 24, 2014, I became part of the ArgyllFreePress team.