Jimmy has blogged about this before and here is one more anlaysis someone posted at the Active Low Carber fourm. HDL is a significant factor, even with low LDL. (Of course, in lowering LDL with statins, it's the effects of the drugs that provide modest benefit to some people, not the lower LDL, but I digress. That fact still doesn't stop the anti-cholesterol machine.)

Saturated fat raises HDL. It also gives you the large, fluffy LDL particles which, unlike the small, dense ones, are harmless. Yet what does the medical establishment tell people to avoid for heart health???? They are just looking for a pharmaceutical solution to make more $$$$, which will lead to more torcetrapib disasters.


Low 'good' cholesterol always bad for your heart
High HDL level protects against cardiovascular attack, researchers say

Updated: 10:00 a.m. CT Sept 27, 2007
BOSTON - The amount of "good cholesterol" in the blood remains an important marker for heart disease regardless of how much "bad cholesterol" is lowered, researchers said on Wednesday.

Among patients taking cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, the higher the HDL or good cholesterol, the less likely they were to have a heart attack or other "cardiovascular event," they found.

Dr. Philip Barter of the Heart Research Institute in Sydney said the result is important because "it shows very, very clearly that the risk is real" when levels of good cholesterol, known as HDL, are too low.

"It means doctors can't ignore a low HDL even if they're treating people with statins. They need to attack the HDL as well, if the HDL remains low," Barter said.

Doctors have known for years that HDL, or high-density lipoprotein, protects against heart attacks and stroke, probably by cleaning up the bad low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, known as LDL.

"But it has not been clear whether a low HDL cholesterol level would remain a significant risk factor in people whose LDL cholesterol was reduced to very low levels," Barter and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Indeed, it had been argued hypothetically that if the LDL cholesterol level were reduced sufficiently, the level of HDL cholesterol might become irrelevant," they added. GUIDE Cholesterol levels

• LDL
• HDL
• Total




Level Status
Less than 100 Optimal
100 - 129 Near optimal - above optimal
130 - 159 Borderline high
160 - 189 High
More than 190 Very high



Source: NCEP


No such luck.

Looking at a study of 9,700 patients taking the statin drug Lipitor in a study financed by maker Pfizer Inc., Barter and his international team of colleagues found that the higher a patient's HDL, the less likely he or she was to have a major cardiovascular event such as a stroke or heart attack.

Difficult to raise levels
"Even when LDL is taken down to very low levels, the kind of levels people say should be the aggressive targets, having a low HDL is still associated with a substantial increase in risk," Barter said in a telephone interview. "It surprised a lot of people and it surprised me."

But raising HDL levels is difficult. One drug that does it, niacin, has bothersome side effects.

Attempts by several companies to design drugs to raise HDL cholesterol have not yet been successful.

In April Pfizer said it was placing a hold on development of any drugs in the same class as torcetrapib, its experimental product that dramatically raised HDL but was scrapped after being linked to deaths in a large trial.

The alternative is to "become lean and become very active. That's probably as effective as anything we have at the moment. But most people who try don't succeed," Barter said. "The biggest frustration is that we don't have the magic bullet like we do for the LDL."

Barter said aggressively lowering levels of bad cholesterol probably reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke by 40 to 50 percent. Having a drug that brought up HDL levels would likely cut the remaining risk by half.

Pfizer paid for the new analysis.

Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21009839

Why take drugs when eating more fat and cutting down carbs is more effective?