Good cholesterol doesn’t lower heart attack risk? :- 18.5.12-TOI

Study Challenges Medical Theory

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. PTI
‘Everyone above 50 must take statins regularly’
London: People aged 50 and more should take statins regularly, as the cholesterol-busting pills help cut the risk a heart attack significantly even in healthy people, a new study has claimed.
    The Oxford University study, which involved about 175,000 people and was published in The Lancet, found taking statins regularly cuts the risk of a heart attack or stroke by a fifth in those who have no sign of the disease.
    Currently, the only people considered at high risk, those with a one-in-five chance of a heart attack in the next 10 years, are given the drugs. But the researchers said treatment guidelines should be reviewed in light of the findings, and there should also be a blanket policy of prescribing all over 50 people statins which can cost as little as $1 for one month