I’ve been here at the Gordon Conference on Lipoprotein Metabolism for 3 days now and, I am seeing an amazing trend.  Even if you know nothing about lipids or lipoproteins, you have heard of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cholesterol.  ‘Good cholesterol’ is found in small lipoprotein particles called high-density lipoproteins or HDL. ‘Bad’ cholesterol is found in low-density lipoproteins or LDL.  It is enormously clear that humans with LDL cholesterol above 100 mg/dl are at significant risk for cardiovascular disease as seen in the Dallas Heart Study, ARIC study, and others.  It is also clear that individuals with high levels of HDL cholesterol are somewhat protected from cardiovascular disease.  So of course the entire pharmaceutical world is hunting for drugs that lower LDL or raise HDL.  Thus statins which are now one the largest drugs ever prescribed, which function to lower blood levels of LDL by upregulating the LDL Receptor in the liver.  If you have a pulse and are over the age of 30 consider being on a statin if you are at high-risk for for cardiovascular disease!

Now comes the interesting other half of the equation.  Recently clinical trials ended for the HDL raising drug torcetrapib. They ended because raising peoples HDL artificially actually killed them faster.  Costing Phizer billions I’m sure.  So I’ve been asking around all the experts here at the meeting and the prevailing under current is, THERE IS NOT ONE SCRAP OF EVIDENCE THAT RAISING HDL CHOLESTEROL IS PROTECTIVE FOR CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE!  Scandalous.  How many labs whole existence is owed to these particles?  How many pharma jobs will be lost?  Crazy!

So the lesson of this blog is correlation is not causation.  Don’t trust dogma!

Rusty