High Levels Of Blood HDL Cholesterol Protects Against Heart Disease And Reduces The Risk Of Cancer

High Levels Of Blood HDL Cholesterol Protects Against Heart Disease And Reduces The Risk Of Cancer.
Higher blood levels of HDL cholesterol, the "good" class that protects against tenderness disease, are also strongly associated with a further chance of cancer, a new review of studies suggests. "For about a 10-point increase of HDL, there is a reduced gamble of cancer by about one third over an average follow-up of 4,5 years," said Dr Richard Karas, leader director of the Tufts Medical Center Molecular Cardiology Research Institute and skipper author of a report in the June 22 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Those numbers come from an scrutiny of 24 randomized controlled trials, aimed at determining the carry out on heart disease of lowering levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol, through the use of statin drugs.

The array singled out trials that also recorded the incidence of cancer among the participants. The researchers news a 36 percent lower cancer rate for every 10 milligrams per liter (mg/dl) higher equal of HDL. But while the relationship between higher HDL and lower cancer hazard was independent of other cancer risk factors, such as smoking, obesity and age, Karas was thorough to say the study does not prove cause and effect.

So "We can say that higher levels of HDL are associated with a farther down risk of cancer, but we can't say that one causes the other," he said. Exactly so, said Dr Jennifer Robinson, professor of epidemiology and drug at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, who wrote an accompanying editorial. High HDL levels may innocently be a marker of the tender-hearted of good traits that reduce both cardiovascular and cancer risk, she said.

And "People have a lot of characteristics that are all big-hearted of interrelated," she said. "They may not exercise, be obese and so on, and so have lower HDL than normal. The higher jeopardize of cancer may have nothing to do with what HDL does".

That's a real possibility, Karas said, but he also mentioned some plausible physical mechanisms that might give HDL cholesterol anti-cancer activity. "HDL alters the formality of the immune system, which looks for abnormal cells that may be cancerous or precancerous and attacks them," he said. "It also has antioxidant properties, and there is a lot of infect in the role of antioxidants in reducing cancer risk".

HDL cholesterol also has anti-inflammatory activity, which might sham against cancer, Karas said. His laboratory is "starting to think" about experiments to assay these various theories, he said. The only convincing proof would be a controlled exploratory testing whether medication that raises HDL levels reduces cancer incidence, Robinson said. No such medication is now on the shop (other than niacin, which has a minor effect in raising HDL levels), although several are being tested for their impact on heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular problems. "We actually don't recognize that something is causing the disease unless we do controlled trials," she said.

The researchers who comportment those studies should monitor cancer incidence as well as cardiovascular disease among the participants, Karas said. The imaginative study's finding that an appreciable effect on cancer was evident in just a few years "shows the account in current studies to track cancer," he said buyrxworld.com. "many don't". Until the anti-cancer premise is proved or disproved, Karas and Robinson said, the best thing to do is adopt the healthy lifestyle that can hoard HDL cholesterol levels high - exercising regularly, eating a sturdy diet, not smoking and consuming alcohol in moderation.