New Dawn, By: Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, 11/22/2013
Before looking at the connection between blood cholesterol levels and heart disease, it is worth highlighting a critically important – remarkably unheralded – fact: After the age of 50, the lower your cholesterol level is, the lower your life expectancy. Perhaps even more important than this is the fact that a falling cholesterol level sharply increases the risk of dying of anything, including heart disease.
The dangers of a low cholesterol level were highlighted by a major long-term study of men living in Honolulu: “Our data accord with previous findings of increased mortality in elderly people with low serum cholesterol, and show that long-term persistence of low cholesterol concentration actually increases the risk of death.” Somewhat ironically, the danger of a falling cholesterol level was first discovered in the Framingham study: “There is a direct association between falling cholesterol levels over the first 14 years [of the study] and mortality over the following 18 years.”
