The mantra that low cholesterol is good for you may not hold true for the elderly, new research has found. The study indicates that in the elderly, it is not good to have cholesterol too high, and it is not good to have it too low. Our message is moderation. The findings were presented recently at the American Heart Association's annual conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention in San Antonio.
Cholesterol is a waxy substance found in the bloodstream.
High levels are believed to be a major risk factor for coronary heart disease. In studies of younger people, the higher the cholesterol, the higher the risk of heart disease, Rodriguez says. But the same relationship has not been found consistently in the few studies that have looked at older people. Rodriguez and her colleagues studied a group of men participating in the ongoing Honolulu Heart Project, which has tracked as many as 8,000 Japanese-American men living on the island of Oahu since 1965. Between 1991 and 1993, researchers examined 2,424 men, then ages 71 to 93, who did not have previous signs of heart disease.