Relatively high LDL-C doesn’t usually lead to a heart attack for most people
LDL-C emerged as a risk factor for heart attack from the Framingham Heart Study, an observational study in Massachusetts that started after World War II and continues today. The takeaway was that if you had very high LDL-C you were more likely to suffer a heart attack. But when the data were analyzed, unless LDL-C was very high (over 200), it wasn’t a risk factor.
In fact, patients with really high LDL-C levels often have a genetic disorder. Your LDL-C level is for the most part genetically determined. Conversely, those with LDL-C levels less than 70 develop relatively little heart disease. Yes, there seems to be a genetic protection at the low end, and risk at the high end.
But for the rest of the population, LDL-C is not a great predictor of who will suffer a heart attack. It’s true that the HR ratio (hazard risk ratio; a measure of difference in risk versus the general population) of LDL-C is 1.3, which means that if your LDL-C is high, you have a 30 percent increase in risk for a heart attack. But correlation doesn’t mean causation. For example, if LDL-C is truly the bad boy of heart disease, as the Medical Establishment says, then why, when you remove younger people from the analysis and just look at older people (greater than sixty years), do high LDL-C levels correlate with longevity? Maybe, once you factor out the people with genetic reasons for high LDL-C (like those with genetic disorders), then LDL-C isn’t really so bad. Or maybe modern medicine tends to target the pathology of an illness rather than preventing it.
References
- Lustig, Robert. (2021). Metabolical Chapter 2. “Modern Medicine” Treats Symptoms, Not Disease (p. 44). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.