Good Cholesterol Might Not Be So Good for Your Health: Here’s Why
6 Feb, 2025 16:54 IST|Sakshi Post
High-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) is typically considered good for an individual’s health because of the way it protects the heart by removing cholesterol from the arteries and carrying it to the liver. It’s in the liver where the cholesterol gets broken down and removed from the body, reducing the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
As a result, there is a notion that’s registered in the minds of people that the higher the HDL, the better it is for the human body. However, there is a recent study that suggests that a high HDL might not be good after all for the body.
After tracking thousands of Brits recently, scientists found out that having higher HDL levels will actually increase the risk of getting an incurable eye condition, glaucoma. In the test, it was also revealed that people with high HDL are 10 percent more likely to get this eye condition than those who don’t.
Another interesting observation to note here is that those with the highest level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) were 8 percent less likely to develop glaucoma. This 8% risk was only observed in people above age 55 (added by researchers from Sun Yat-sen University).
The Chinese researchers further added that even though high levels of HDL are considered good, consistently high levels of HDL might not be favorable to the human body. High LDL cholesterol doesn’t trigger any symptoms but it can heighten the risk of heart problems and strokes.
During the entirety of the study, researchers questioned over 400,000 Brits with ages ranging from 40 to 69 over their health history. It was a prolonged research that extended for 14 years and out of all the surveyed people, 6,868(nearly 2 percent) developed glaucoma.
One crucial observation here is that the participants who developed glaucoma were far more likely to be ex-smokers and had diabetes than those who didn’t get the eye condition.
Scientists also admitted that the research they did might have limitations as they used just one blood sample from each participant, which might not accurately capture individuals’ typical lipid levels.
