High cholesterol during young adulthood raises heart disease risk
New research in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation shows that long-term exposure to elevated cholesterol substantially increases lifetime risk for heart disease. For every ten years you have even mildly elevated cholesterol between the ages of 35 and 55, your risk of heart disease may be increased by nearly 40 percent.
“Our findings suggest that they [adults with longstanding mild to moderately [taken from the manuscript] elevated cholesterol levels] may benefit from more aggressive prevention strategies earlier,” said lead study author Ann Marie Navar-Boggan, M.D., Ph.D, and cardiology fellow at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, N.C.