Controlling cholesterol levels from as early as childhood is the best approach to reducing the incidence of coronary heart disease.
© AFP/Getty Images/File Tim BoyleAugust 5, 2008 (Sawf News) - Researchers are proposing that controlling cholesterol levels from as early as childhood is the best approach to reducing the incidence of coronary heart disease.
Pioneering lipid researcher Daniel Steinberg of UC San Diego, and colleagues Christopher Glass, M.D., Ph.D. and Joseph Witztum, M.D., call current approaches to lowering cholesterol to prevent heart disease “too little, too late.”
“...our long-term goal should be to alter our lifestyle accordingly, beginning in infancy or early childhood” and that “…instituting a low-saturated fat, low-cholesterol diet in infancy (7 months) is perfectly safe, without adverse effects…”
Cholesterol lowering drugs like statins, usually prescribed to patients 50 years and above, show a 30% decrease in death and disability from heart disease while 70% of patients have cardiac events while on statin therapy.
Lowering bad cholesterol (low-density lipoproteins - LDL) to less than 50 mg./dl. even in children and young adults is a safe and potentially life-saving standard, through lifestyle (diet and exercise) changes if possible. Drug treatment may also be necessary in those at very high risk.
“Studies show that fatty streak lesions in the arteries that are a precursor to atherosclerosis and heart disease begin in childhood, and advanced lesions are not uncommon by age 30. Why not nip things in the bud?” Such early signs of heart disease should be taken as seriously as early signs of cancer or diabetes, said Steinberg.
The UC San Diego team notes that studies of Japanese men in the 1950s showed that consuming a low-fat diet from infancy resulted in lifelong low cholesterol levels, and their death rate from heart disease was only 10% of the rate of cardiac-related death in the U.S. Even with risk factors such as cigarette smoking and diabetes, heart disease deaths remained significantly lower in Japanese men with lifetime levels of low cholesterol. This protective effect was lost in Japanese who migrated to the United States and adopted a Western diet leading to higher blood cholesterol levels.
Initiating cholesterol-lowering interventions in 50-year-old adults, even if successful, is unlikely to reverse established arterial disease and will therefore have limited impact on the occurrence of adverse events related to coronary heart disease.
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