Word: ldl
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...counter this confusion, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute has for the past three years been running a National Cholesterol Education Program. Last year the program set 200 mg/dl as the amount of total cholesterol (essentially LDL plus HDL) above which individuals are considered to be potentially at risk of developing heart disease; those between 200 and 239 are borderline high risk; anyone with a count of 240 or more may be at high risk. The program suggested that everybody should aim for an LDL count of 130 or lower. However, it did not recommend specific HDL targets...
Portable analyzers, though, cannot calculate LDL and HDL levels. Even many laboratories have been unable to give consistently accurate counts of HDL. Yet that figure may be the most vital statistic of all in evaluating cardiovascular health in otherwise moderate- or low-risk individuals. Says Dr. Bruce Gordon, associate professor of medicine at Manhattan's Rogosin Institute: "There are a sizable number of people who would be inappropriately treated unless their HDL levels were taken into account...
Michael Bruno of Cincinnati is one heart-disease patient who has benefited from drug therapy. A 55-year-old former printing-plant foreman, Michael and his brother Daniel, 58, a retired barber in Canonsburg, Pa., have a genetic disorder that results in very high levels of LDL and low levels of HDL. Daniel has suffered a heart attack, and both brothers have had bypass surgery. Now the Brunos are on low-saturated-fat diets and are taking lovastatin. In addition, Michael is taking gemfibrozil. Since the brothers started their programs, Michael's total cholesterol has fallen from...
...proof that raising HDL alone can lower a person's risk of heart disease. No convincing body of evidence from animal studies has yet demonstrated the value of raising HDL, and no clinical trial to date has specifically targeted humans with low HDL. "Much the same question existed for LDL until this decade, when it was unequivocally shown that lowering LDL decreases the risk," says Levy. The situation is similar with HDL today, he says, "except that with HDL we have not been smart enough yet to set up clinical trials designed to test whether raising HDL alone will...
...VLDL boats unload their triglycerides into body tissues, the carriers get progressively smaller, denser and proportionately more cholesterol-rich, ultimately becoming particles of LDL. The LDLs are then pulled out of the bloodstream by special protein receptors on the surface of cells. "These receptors reach out and grab cholesterol like a first baseman catching a ball thrown by a shortstop," says Dr. Michael Brown of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who, with his colleague Dr. Joseph Goldstein, won a Nobel Prize in 1985 for discovering LDL receptors. What happens to excess LDLs that are not taken...