Cholesterolemia and Hypercholesterolemia

What is Cholesterolemia?

Cholesterolemia 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?

Cholesterolemia is influenced by the rate at which the body, especially in the liver, produces cholesterol, and to a lesser extent by the diet.

For this reason, in the days preceding the sample, the "diet" must be sober and low in fatty foods and alcohol, which could excessively alter the cholesterol levels.

The Body Produces Cholesterol

The organism of a healthy person, weighing about 68 kg, synthesizes approximately one gram of cholesterol every day, contains in total about 35 times as much and obtains from the diet around 250 mg / day.

Normal Values

Although there is a certain individual variability on the basis of various factors (sex, age, genetics, dietary style, physical activity), in the adult cholesterolemia averages 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, diet influences cholesterol values by only 10-20%.

Cholesterolemia is in fact largely dependent 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 a metabolic disorder which in turn can become the cause of various morbid processes, in particular cardiovascular pathologies.

In the vast majority of cases, hypercholesterolemia does not give any evident symptoms; however, when it lasts for several years, it favors the formation of sticky deposits (called plaques) on the internal walls of the arteries. These plaques can decrease the blood flow and stop it. depriving important organs such as the heart and brain of an adequate supply of oxygen and nutrients. There is also a concrete risk that the affected blood vessel will break or that the atherosclerotic plaque breaks and undergoes a coagulation process, with the formation of a thick thrombus cause of sudden heart attack or stroke.

Health Risks

When does hypercholesterolemia become dangerous?

In the previous paragraph we saw that hypercholesterolemia is an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, in particular for atherosclerosis (plaque formation in large arteries) and associated pathologies, such as angina pectoris, "heart attack and" stroke.

The need to keep cholesterol levels as adequate as possible therefore appears evident. But what are these levels?

Correctly interpret the cholesterol values

Simple to measure and cheap, but now considered superficial and not very significant, total cholesterol is only one of the many factors that predispose to cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cigarette smoking, obesity, hypertriglyceridemia , familiarity with these pathologies and physical inactivity. Some of these factors are modifiable (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 aimed at bringing cholesterolemia back to normal is not dictated by the exceeding of 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 sports patient, non-smoker, young, in perfect shape and with a cholesterolemia equal to 220 mg / dl and to prescribe statins to another subject who, despite having a cholesterolemia equal to 170 mg / dl, presents, overall, a high cardiovascular risk (for example because diabetic or post-heart attack).

As if that 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), radicals free, pro-inflammatory factors (especially the C reactive protein or PCR), nitric oxide, the inevitable triglycerides and many others.