For people who like to monitor their health by the numbers, understanding cholesterol readings has always been fairly straightforward: total cholesterol readings, and especially the so-called “bad cholesterol”– low-density lipoproteins (LDLs)– should be low while the so-called “good cholesterol”– or high-density lipoproteins (HDLs)– should be high.
Well, it’s never really been that simple, but public health authorities haven’t wished to burden the public with confusing complexities. Researchers keep finding new subgroupings of cholesterol components that seem to proliferate almost endlessly, and the implications of each new finding are sometimes unclear.
Scientists would like to develop a test to provide a truly sophisticated analysis of a person’s blood content with respect to fatty elements that would provide a more accurate forecast of health risks.
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The latest move in this direction comes from a North Carolina State University biochemist who has developed a blood test that detects 15 different subclasses of cholesterol-containing lipoproteins.
“It’s not cholesterol, per se, that’s really important,” said James Otvos, a professor ofbiochemistry who invented the new test. “Rather it’s the size and type of lipoproteins that count in predicting disease. There are plenty of examples of individuals who have identical levels of total cholesterol, bad cholesterol and good cholesterol, but they have very different risks of coronary artery disease.”
In a study of 158 men, the new test showed that people who had large packages of very low-density lipoproteins combined with very small packets of HDL had a risk of artery disease 15 times greater than men whose overall cholesterol numbers were similar but who had more normal-sized lipoprotein packets.
The findings by Otvos and his colleagues were published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, a journal of the American Heart Association.
Epilepsy and fertility
Previous studies that suggest people with epilepsy are less fertile than normal apparently were wrong, a new study in Iceland has found.
By looking at everyone in Iceland diagnosed with epilepsy over a five-year period and comparing their fertility rates with people of the same age and gender in Iceland, the new study was designed to overcome problems with previous studies. The latest study, published in the July issue of Neurology, found that epilepsy patients on average had two children–the sameas those without the disorder.
“Other studies have found decreased fertility among people with epilepsy, which has given patients and their families and physicians the perception that they may have difficulty having children,” said Dr. W. Allen Hauser, a neurologist with Columbia University. “Our study is good news for the average person with epilepsy.”