How To Improve Good Cholesterol (HDL) If Drugs Don’t Work

January 9, 2013 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

The Wall Street Journal on 1/8/13 had an article called “New Rules for Boosting Good Cholesterol” which shared the results of a recent study on medications that improve HDL (or Good Cholesterol).

“Not all HDL are created the same” was what Roger Newton, chief science officer of Esperion said.

“If you raise HDL in non-pharmacologic ways, it really does help you” says Steve Kopecky, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist.

The points made in the article can be summarized in the following:

Improving good cholesterol is important.
People with high HDL face fewer heart attacks (according to the Framingham Risk Score)
Multiple trials to improve HDL with drugs have failed
People may need to raise good cholesterol by behavior change

This should lead to 3 questions:

What should be my HDL or Good Cholesterol? From the Mayo Clinic on Good Cholesterol:

What can I do to improve my Good Cholesterol without drugs? From the WSJ article:

Activity	HDL Increase
Exercise	4 mg/dL
Drink Alcohol (in Moderation)	2-4 mg/dL
Quit Smoking	5 mg/dL
Lose Weight	1 mg/dL per 3-6 lbs
Eat Fish And Olive Oil	3-5 mg/dL
Avoid Carbohydrates	8 mg/dL

What are my risks and the value of medications? For that, I found two online risk tools.

Here’s a simple one that uses the Farmingham study to estimate your risk of having a heart attack.

Here’s another one from over in Europe that’s focused on the value of statins and hosted by the Cleveland Clinic. It takes more inputs but then gives you several outputs. (A nice algorithm to integrate with something like iBlueButton or your care management system perhaps to warn you of risks without having you input a bunch of data.)