Via Eurekalert, apparently having ultra-low cholesterol can be bad for you. Is this that surprising?
See, what I thought was really surprising was that other studies had, up until now, shown that having extremely low amounts of cholesterol (via high doses of statins) didn’t cause health problems. Cholesterol is an essential molecule in the body, and lowering cholesterol to less than natural levels seems like it would do harm…and now, apparently it does.
Well, that’s kind of surprising, yes. They don’t mention what the relative levels of HDL and LDL were, though. Having low LDL tends to be better, but if HDL gets too low, that’s harmful too. Statins actually tend to raise HDL levels (or have very little effect on that population).
Presumably if there was a simple linear relationship between cholesterol and fitness, then selection would have tinkered with the cholesterol biosynthetic rates until they was pretty low. The fact that we don’t have nearly zero cholesterol synthesis rates means that having ultra-low levels probably has bad side effects, ones that aren’t necessarily obvious to us, perhaps.
So I don’t find it that surprising that lowering cholesterol below its natural levels found in healthy patients would be detrimental.
It’s very odd to me that there’s another Ben who posts here…
Wasn’t there a drug that hit CETP (the LDL-HDL converter) which proved to not be effective?
This could be resolved if one of you decides to post as something other than simply “Ben”…
You’re probably thinking of torcetrapib, which crashed because of toxicity issues, not necessarily because of ineffectiveness. I don’t think it’s certain whether the toxicity is mechanism-based or just a side effect.
