See also: familial hypercholesterolemia
What is cholesterolemia?
Cholesterol is the amount of cholesterol present in the blood. It is measured on a small blood sample taken fasting for at least 10-12 hours and is expressed in milligrams of cholesterol per deciliter of blood (mg / dl).
Depends on what?
What affects blood cholesterol values?
For this reason, in the days preceding the taking, the feeding must be sober and poor in fatty foods and alcohol, which could alter the cholesterolemic values in excess.
The body produces cholesterol
The body of a healthy person, weighing about 68 kg, synthesizes approximately one gram of cholesterol every day, contains a total of about 35 times as much and gets around 250 mg / day from the diet.
Normal values
Although there is some individual variability based on various factors (sex, age, genetics, dietary style, physical activity), in the adult cholesterolemia is on average between 140 and 200 mg / dl. When the concentration of cholesterol in the blood exceeds these values, or more generally those considered normal for the reference population, we speak of hypercholesterolemia .
On average, nutrition affects cholesterol values by only 10-20% .
Cholesterolemia depends largely on the amount of cholesterol produced by the human body.
Hypercholesterolemia
The excessive concentration of cholesterol in the blood is not a real disease, but rather a metabolic disorder which in turn can become the cause of various morbid processes, in particular of cardiovascular diseases.
In the vast majority of cases, hypercholesterolemia does not give any obvious symptoms; however, when it lasts for several years, it favors the formation of sticky deposits (called plaques) on the inner walls of the arteries. These plaques can decrease blood flow to the point of interrupting it, depriving important organs such as the heart and brain of an adequate supply of oxygen and nutrients. Also concrete is the risk that the affected blood vessel will rupture or that the atherosclerotic plaque ruptures and undergoes a coagulation process, with the formation of a thrombus often causing sudden cardiac infarction or stroke.
Health risks
When does hypercholesterolemia become dangerous?
In the previous paragraph we have seen that hypercholesterolemia is an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, in particular for atherosclerosis (formation of plaques in large caliber arteries) and the associated diseases, such as angina pectoris, l heart attack and stroke.
The need to maintain cholesterolemia at levels that are as adequate as possible is therefore evident. But what are these levels?
Correctly interpret cholesterol values
Simple to measure and cheap, but now considered superficial and insignificant, total cholesterol is only one of the many factors that predispose to cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cigarette smoking, obesity, hypertriglyceridemia, the familiarity with these pathologies and physical inactivity. Some of these factors are changeable (cigarette smoking, blood pressure, diabetes mellitus), while others are defined as non-modifiable (age, sex, family history and genetic factors).
In light of these considerations, the decision to undertake a treatment capable of bringing back cholesterol to normal levels is not dictated by exceeding a particular limit value, but by the overall assessment of the cardiovascular risk of the individual. Thus, for example, the doctor may decide not to treat a young, non-smoker sportsman in perfect shape with a cholesterol level of 220 mg / dl and to prescribe statins to another person who, despite having a cholesterol level of 170 mg / dl, presents, on the whole, an elevated cardiovascular risk (for example because diabetic or post-infarcted).
As if this were not enough, in recent years numerous other "cardiovascular risk thermometers" have been proposed, such as homocysteine, hyperuricemia, platelet aggregability, apolipoproteins (especially apolipoprotein A1 and apolipoprotein B), i free radicals, pro-inflammatory factors (especially C-reactive protein or PCR), nitric oxide, the inevitable triglycerides and many others.
