Fasting Before Lipid Panel Unnecessary
Requiring patients to fast for 8 to 12 hours before a lipid panel blood draw is common practice, but fasting adds no clinical value and is an unnecessary burden on patients, researchers said.
Analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey III (NHANES-III) revealed no significant difference between fasting and nonfasting LDL cholesterol levels when it came to predicting all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, New York University associate professor of medicine Sripal Bangalore, MD, and colleagues wrote in Circulation.
The study is not the first to find no benefit for fasting prior to a lipid panel blood draw. Another… Continue reading
Cholesterol Levels Linked to Breast Cancer Risk
High cholesterol levels may increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer, a large new British study reports (HealthDay News).
The findings suggest that keeping tight control over cholesterol through medication could help prevent breast cancer, said lead author Rahul Potluri, a researcher at the Aston University School of Medical Sciences in Birmingham, England.
Researchers reviewed the medical records of over 660,000 female patients in Birmingham and Manchester between 2000 and 2013, using a statistical model to study the association between high cholesterol and breast cancer.
The investigators determined that high cholesterol increases a woman’s risk of developing… Continue reading
More Testing for Cholesterol
Even though rising obesity rates are contributing to higher cholesterol levels among young Americans, less than 4 percent of U.S. children had their cholesterol levels checked between 1995 and 2010, new research shows.
According to a team led by Dr. Samuel Vinci of Boston Children’s Hospital, abnormal blood cholesterol reading are thought to occur in roughly a fifth of American children and adolescents.
The concern is that – if left untreated – problematic cholesterol levels among youth could translate into heart disease in adulthood.
Alert to the problem, since 2007 several organizations – including the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and… Continue reading
Total and High-density Lipoprotein Cholesterol in Adults
Almost 13% of adult Americans have high total cholesterol, and 17.4% had low HDL cholesterol according to the new data on cholesterol levels in U.S. which was recently published in National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey by the National Center for Health Statistics.
High levels of total cholesterol and low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (the “good cholesterol”) are risk factors for coronary heart disease. Notably, less than 70% of adult Americans are screened for cholesterol – a simple and very inexpensive test, which every person aged 20 and over should take at least once every 5 years. Read full report.
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