Washington, May 26 (IANS) More ‘good’ cholesterol might not always be beneficial for your health, says a new study.
We’ve all heard about the importance of raising HDL, so-called ‘good’ cholesterol, and lowering LDL, or ‘bad’ cholesterol, to improve heart health. And popular perception is that HDL cholesterol is an inherently good thing — but a new study shows that for a certain group of patients, this is not always the case.
‘It seems counterintuitive that increasing good cholesterol, which we’ve always thought of as protective, leads to negative consequences in some people,’ said James Corsetti, who led the study.
‘We’ve confirmed that high HDL cholesterol is in fact associated with risk in a certain group of patients,’ said Corsetti, professor of pathology and lab medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in the US.
The study, which was published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, is the first to suggest that a high level of the supposedly good cholesterol places a subgroup of patients at high risk for recurrent coronary events, such as chest pain, heart attack, and death.
The findings could help explain disappointing results from a high-profile Pfizer clinical trial testing torcetrapib, an experimental drug designed to increase levels of HDL cholesterol, that some predicted would become a blockbuster medicine.
The trial was halted in 2006 due to a surprisingly excessive number of cardiovascular events and death.
As in the current study, cardiovascular events in the torcetrapib trial were associated with higher levels of ‘good’ HDL cholesterol, though the reasons were unclear.
Using a novel graphical data mapping tool – outcome event mapping – Corsetti and his team identified a group of patients in which elevated levels of HDL cholesterol place them in a high-risk category for coronary events.
rounak