Stroke and Heart Attack Despite Good Cholesterol

If your cholesterol numbers are good, you may still not be protected from heart attacks and strokes because of something you did during your teens and 20s.

That’s because—according to a new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology—it may be more about what you did then than now.

Scientists from the University of Maryland School of Medicine wanted to find out how cholesterol during several stages of our lives affect our chance of cardiovascular events as we age.

They used information already collected by the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute), which had recruited 4,958 people between ages 18 and 30 in 1985-86.

35 years later, these people are now in their 50s and 60s and are a rich source of medical information.

The two data sets that specifically interested the researchers were their cholesterol scores over time and whether they had suffered from coronary heart disease, stroke, or a transient ischemic attack (a lighter version of a stroke).

They also checked whether the subjects had been hospitalized with heart failure, treated for peripheral arterial disease, undergone bypass surgery or coronary balloon angioplasty, or whether they had died from cardiovascular disease.

The researchers found that those who had high LDL-C cholesterol scores between ages 18 and 30 were the most likely to experience these events after age 40, even if they had dropped their cholesterol to normal levels by then.

In other words, two people above age 40 with the same cholesterol scores may have very different risks for cardiovascular events and cardiovascular disease, depending on what their cholesterol scores looked like during their teens and 20s.

The reason for this finding is probably that the traditional medical system has no options to reverse arterial damage and that the arterial damage that occurs throughout our lives is cumulative.

Fortunately, it’s easy to clear out cholesterol buildup in your arteries if you just cut out this ONE ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming…