Major lipids, apolipoproteins, and risk of vascular disease.

Description

In order to clarify important notions concerning the assessment of major lipids and apolipoproteins for the prediction of vascular risk, a large collaboration between several investigators studying this question was established which allowed the pooling of one hundred and twelve prospective studies of cardiovascular risk factors, involving a total of 1.2 million participants. The present paper including more than 300,000 individuals revealed that there was no difference in hazard ratios between non-HDL cholesterol or HDL cholesterol versus apolipoprotein B and A1 and that the feeding status did not influence the relationship between lipids and vascular diseases. Moreover, concentrations of HDL cholesterol and non-HDL cholesterol were both strongly associated, in opposite directions, with CHD risk. These results suggest that the measurement of either total and HDL cholesterol levels or apolipoproteins is the simplest way to assess vascular disease without the need to fast and without consideration for triglycerides.