Word: ldl
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About a??year??ago, my doctor put me on the statin drug Lipitor. My LDL--the bad cholesterol--was a bit high, and diet and exercise hadn't reduced it very much. The drug worked. At my last checkup, about a month ago, my LDL had plunged...
...knows? My doctor didn't test for it, and it didn't occur to me to ask. But two reports in last week's New England Journal of Medicine suggest that CRP may be just as important a risk factor for coronary-artery disease and heart attacks as LDL--and maybe more so. Does that mean I should have had the test? Not on the basis of what was known then. But now things are different...
Doctors have known for a decade that statin drugs can prevent or reduce the severity of cardiovascular disease by lowering blood levels of LDL. But how low is low enough? A landmark study of more than 4,000 heart patients compared a standard LDL-lowering regimen (40 mg of Pravachol) with an intensive regimen (80 mg of Lipitor) and found that even though both reduced LDL levels to below the recommended benchmark of 100 mg/dL, the patients on the higher dose were 16% less likely than those on the lower dose to get worse or die. The bottom line: what...
...benefits of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. These studies identified a group of Americans at extremely high risk--among them, people who smoke, have diabetes, have high blood pressure or have suffered at least one heart attack--who could lower their heart-disease risk by cutting their level of LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, from the previous target of below 100 mg/dL to below 70 mg/dL. Even people at moderate risk of a heart attack--those with two or more risk factors, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, being overweight or a family history of heart disease--should lower...
...each history, however, the section labeled FAMILY HEALTH HISTORY gave me pause. Few diseases are purely genetic, but plenty have genetic components. If my father suffered from elevated LDL, or bad cholesterol, my doctor should know that, because I'm probably at higher risk. If my mother had breast cancer, my sister (if I had one) would want her physician to be especially vigilant...