Washington, Dec 25: In what’s being claimed as a new hope for victims of heart attack, scientists claim to have found a “key trigger” for cardiovascular disease in a form of cholesterol which is not influenced by diet.
A team at Oxford University has found that the lipoprotein(a) — or Lp(a) –causes furring of the arteries, the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’ reported.
The discovery confirms what doctors have suspected for some time and means patients can be treated with drugs as simple as aspirin. This could help cut the number of people suffering from cardiovascular disease.
The latest study can be added to the results of research into “good” cholesterol – HDL – and “bad” cholesterol – LDL. When the level of bad cholesterol gets too high, it can be reversed by prescribing pills called statins.
Patients are also told to eat a healthy diet, as creamy and fatty foods raise levels of LDL.
For their study, the scientists studied the genes of 16,000 people from the UK and across Europe and found that the levels of the cholesterol appear to depend on our genes rather than something else.
Prof Hugh Watkins, British Heart Foundation Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine at Oxford University and a lead author of the study, said that Lp(a) is a third class of cholesterol “we should pay attention to”.
“Now that we know that Lp(a) is actually a cause of heart disease, testing whether treatments that lower it actually prevent heart attacks should become a priority,” he was quoted by the ‘Daily Express’ as saying.
—Agencies