Even slightly higher levels took their toll, researchers note
WebMD News from HealthDay
By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Jan. 26, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Many folks in their 30s and 40s chow down on burgers, fried chicken and other fatty foods without fear, figuring they have years before they need to worry about their cholesterol levels.
But new research reveals that long-term exposure to even slightly higher cholesterol levels can damage a person's future heart health.
People at age 55 who've lived with 11 to 20 years of high cholesterol showed double the risk of heart disease compared to people that age with only one to 10 years of high cholesterol, and quadruple the risk of people who had low cholesterol levels, researchers report online Jan. 26 in the journal Circulation.
"The duration of time a person has high cholesterol increases a person's risk of heart disease above and beyond the risk posed by their current cholesterol level," said study author Dr. Ann Marie Navar-Boggan, a cardiology fellow at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, N.C. "Adults with the highest duration of exposure to high cholesterol had a fourfold increased risk of heart disease, compared with adults who did not have high cholesterol."
Navar-Boggan and her colleagues concluded that for every 10 years a person has borderline-elevated cholesterol between the ages of 35 and 55, their risk of heart disease increases by nearly 40 percent.
"In our 30s and 40s, we are laying the foundation for the future of our heart health," she said.
For this study, which was partly funded by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, researchers relied on data from the Framingham Heart Study, one of the largest ongoing research projects focused on heart health. Since 1948, families in the town of Framingham, Mass., have allowed researchers to track their health.
The researchers took 1,478 adults from the study who had not developed heart disease by age 55, and then calculated the length of time each person had experienced high cholesterol by that age.
They defined high cholesterol very conservatively in this study, pegging it at about 130 mg/dL of "bad" LDL cholesterol, a level which the U.S. National Institutes of Health considers the lowest end of "borderline high" cholesterol.
source : Prolonged High Cholesterol in Middle Age Raises Heart Risk Later: Study
