You don’t really need to remember all of the nitty-gritty details on the various types of cholesterol, just the bottom line: If your cholesterol levels are out of whack, you’re heart disease risk is increased. Exactly how cholesterol wreaks havoc is fairly complicated. All cells have receptors, or “doors,” that suck LDL into them. If you have too much cholesterol in your blood, the cells make fewer receptors so they can avoid, quite literally, drowning in cholesterol. This, in turn, leads to more cholesterol floating in your bloodstream. While some of it gets returned to your liver for disposal via the garbage-bearing HDL, some of it stays in the bloodstream. [fit hangs around long enough, it may become oxidized. And some of it burrows into your artery walls, where it’s even more likely to become oxidized. To understand oxidation, think about what happens to a metal chair when it’s left out in the backyard: It rusts. That’s what happens to cells in the body when...
Generally, your doctor will order a cholesterol test as part of your routine health exam. You should fast for 9 to 12 hours before the test. If you’ve recently had a stroke, surgery, infection, weight loss, pregnancy, or a change in your usual diet, the results may be skewed, so try to wait until you’re back to normal before taking the test. The basic cholesterol test reveals total cholesterol and HDL levels, In some cases, your doctor may order a more detailed test, known as a complete lipid profile, for more information click here. Medicare and most other health insurance plans cover these tests. Other tests to know about include: Skin cholesterol test. Approved by the FDA in June 2002, Cholesterol 1,2,3, is the world’s first noninvasive (read: no needle stick) cholesterol test. The three-minute test, performed at a doctor’s office, measures the amount of cholesterol in the skin on the palm of your hand. Clinical studies found that using the test, in addition to...
Eat too much and you gain weight, It’s one of the simplest facts in medicine, But the repercussions of gluttony go beyond weight gain. When you eat more calories than you need, your body converts them into a form of fat called triglycerides and sends them to your fat. cells for storage. Although triglycerides aren’t technically a form of cholesterol, they are a blood fat, or lipid, just like cholesterol They’re also sharing space in those same lipoprotein bubbles that carry cholesterol around, so its nearly impossible to consider one without considering the other. Normally, you should have only small amounts of triglycerides in your bloodstream. If your level is high (above 200 mg/dl 8 to 10 hours alter your last meal), there’s a problem. The higher your level, the more triglycerides are delivered to your liver, where they are transformed into LDL and VLDL—which, as you saw earlier, significantly contribute to CHD. Doctors used to think that an elevated blood...
As if HDL, LDL, and VLDL weren’t enough to track, researchers are discovering other types of lipoproteins that play a role in your CHD risk. Again, the standard cholesterol test doesn’t measure them, but most are included in a complete lipid profile. Chylomicrons You probably haven’t heard of this class of lipoproteins, as researchers are just beginning to understand their role as a risk factor in CHD. But chylomicrons (ki-LO-mikrons) give rise to all other forms of lipoproteins. When you eat, the fat in your meal passes through your digestive system into your intestine. There the cells lining the small intestine transform the fat. into small droplets of fat and protein that contain cholesterol and triglycerides. These droplets are the chylomicrons, They head out of your gut and into your bloodstream, eventually encountering enzymes that break them down into chylomicron remnants. The remnants continue on to your liver, where they’re repackaged as other forms of...
Like so many things, cholesterol isn’t bad for you unless there’s too much of it, at which point it begins to cause trouble. The story isn’t quite that simple, however. As you probably already know, there are different kinds of cholesterol—some bad, some good. And how much you have of each type makes a tremendous difference in your likelihood of developing CHD. It’s actually not cholesterol per se that’s good or bad for you, but the’ “vehicle” through which it travels ‘ your bloodstream. Because cholesterol is waxy, it can’t mix with blood, which is watery. Like oil in a salad dressing, it Americans eat, remains separate. Your body manufactures three or four times more cholesterol than most Americans eat. To enter the cells and tissues where it’s needed, then, it hooks up with proteins, creating special transporters called lipoproteins. Think of these as submarine-like bubbles that carry cholesterol around the body. Some of these “submarines” are...
Although cholesterol has gotten a bad rap over the years, it’s not, by itself, a badthing. Cholesterol is a soft, faintly yellow, naturally occurring waxy substance found it cell walls and membranes throughout your body, including your brain, nerves, muscles, skin, liver, intestines, and heart. It’s one of several fats, or lipids, your body produces. Without enough cholesterol, you simply couldn’t live. You use cholesterol to produce sex hormones (including estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone), vitamin D, and bile acids that help you digest fat. However, you need only a relatively small amount to take care of all of these things. And your body (your liver, intestines, and even Skin) manufactures plenty of it about three or four times more cholesterol than most Americans eat, That means you could go the rest of your life without ever consuming another bite of cholesterol and you’d be just fine. (Although there’s no need to do so; you’ll read later on...
We all walk around with lots of numbers in our head, and for many of us, in the last 10 years or so our “cholesterol number” became one of them. Because as almost everyone knows, too much cholesterol gums up the arteries, setting the stage for a heart attack. Yet if you turn back the clock 100 years, no one was talking about cholesterol In fact, clogged arteries remained an uncommon condition well into the 20th century. In 1910 William Osler, M.D., often called the father of modern medicine, described angina pectoris—painful chest. spasms caused when narrowed arteries impede the flow of blood to the heart—as a rare disease, claiming he hadn’t even seen a case until late in his practice, Today more than 7 million Americans have angina, and it’s a rare general practitioner, let alone cardiologist, who isn’t all too familiar with this condition. Angina is considered a definitive sign of coronary heart disease, or CHD, the No. | killer of both men and women in the United...
