Suffering from heart disease? Ever wondered about how they originate? One thing is for sure, life to them is no less than a battlefield. As cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally, taking an estimated 17.9 million lives each year (1).
To reverse these numbers you need to know who you are fighting. Because if you don’t know your enemy how would you dominate the battlefield? Have you ever been advised by your doctor to exercise more to lower down your cholesterol levels? It must have happened because each decade of high cholesterol increases your risk of heart disease by almost 40% percent (2). Therefore, high cholesterol individuals tend to develop heart diseases at some point in life.
Cholesterol and Heart diseases
Has it ever struck your mind that what is this cholesterol and how it is responsible for heart attack? So this cholesterol is a type of waxy lipid or fat that you get from fatty food. So when you consume an excess of this fatty diet for a prolonged interval of time. This cholesterol deposits in your arteries which supply blood to the heart and brain. This is called plaque formation. Eventually, this plaque deposition over time narrows down the diameter of arteries. Thus compromising blood volumes reaching the heart. Ultimately leading to heart attack or stroke in the future.
Cholesterol and Lipoprotein
If you have ever undergone a lipid profile test, you must have noticed an array of different types of cholesterol. Like HDL(high-density lipoprotein), LDL(low-density lipoproteins), and total cholesterol. Let’s try to understand these with an analogy. There must be a waste truck that comes to your house to collect household waste. The truck acts as a carrier of waste from your house( site of waste production) to either a dumping land or a waste management plant. Similarly, lipoproteins are the dump trucks that carry cholesterol in your body.
As a coin has two faces, everyone has both good and bad sides. Similarly, lipoproteins are also of two types. Here the good one is high-density lipoprotein which carries cholesterol from body parts and eliminates it from the liver. Similar to dump trucks that carry your house waste to dump sites. Try to imagine what will happen if the waste trucks dump all the city waste at your home. Your house will turn into a mess, right? This is somewhat similar to low-density lipoproteins work. These are the bad ones as they collect cholesterol from the liver and dump it in your body organs leading to plaque deposition.
The size of the dump trucks carrying the waste from your home is also important because the smaller the truck, the larger is the number of trucks trying to block your driveway. The point is lipid profile only tells you the weight of your waste (cholesterol) while the size of the dump trucks (lipoproteins) notify the probability of the accumulation of plaque in your arteries.
Risk Factors leading to High Cholesterol
To further deepen your concepts about cholesterol. Let’s help you cogitate few reasons behind high cholesterol levels and the small particle size that led to heart attack or stroke complications in your body.
Hereditary: one reason behind this abnormal behavior of cholesterol in the body is your genes. Your family history defines a lot about your body.
Lifestyle: the other one which is having a major impact is your lifestyle. The speed with which living standards are modernizing nowadays is directly proportional to newer sedentary habits. Obesity, specifically central obesity or increasing belly fat, paves multiple ways for diseases like diabetes to develop. This ultimately impacts your cholesterol levels. As HDL level decreases while triglycerides increase with small-sized LDL particles. If you are having such a lifestyle just add on some exercise instead of cheesy dips. Try to limit your carbohydrate, sugary, refined processed food, and alcohol to a certain extent.
Here comes another point of discussion. Are you diabetic? If yes, do you have insulin resistance? Check these things out beforehand as being diabetic, comes with obesity and that belly fat is responsible for all the chaos. It releases inflammatory mediators which oxidize your LDL cholesterol ( leading to a drop in antioxidant levels ). Hence more cholesterol is accumulated in your body.
So, if you are obese, diabetic, and having abnormal cholesterol levels. Consider opting for lipid profile, particle testing, and inflammation testing to ascertain the cause first and afterward go for adequate treatment.
If you have a sedentary lifestyle, add some exercise and take a balanced diet with more vitamins and antioxidants.
Why is it that not everyone with High Cholesterol is at risk of heart diseases?
The above question can be answered with the help of below given two scenarios:
Imagine a person who is having total cholesterol of 300 mg/dl ( Normal Range: between 125 mg/dl to 200 mg/dl ) and LDL of 150 mg/dl ( Normal Range: less than 70 mg/dl ). The LDL is very high as compared to HDL. But the person has a healthy outlook. Can you give it a shot that a patient with such high cholesterol, how he can be healthy and not at risk of developing heart disease? Yes, you are right if you are thinking about the size of the dump trucks here as the person is having large, light, and fluffy particles which will not get accumulated in the arteries. There is no need for treatment with statins and aspirin; you can just go for diet modification to lower the levels of cholesterol in the body.
Let’s take another example of a patient with total cholesterol of 150 and low LDL levels but he still might be at a higher risk of developing a heart attack. The hint here is “the particle size of the cholesterol is small”. So, this patient requires statins and aspirin treatment.
Hence not only weight but size and number of cholesterol particles play a very important role in determining the risk for heart disease. Therefore one should also go for particle size testing after lipid profile.
If you know the culprit, crime, and type of Cholesterol you can figure out the retribution.
References
Content Credits
Rashi Bahuguna
Author
Ankita Chaudhary
Editor
Comments