New Cholesterol Said to Triple Heart Risk

An estimated 1 in 3 Americans inherits a newly recognized form of cholesterol that is linked with triple the usual risk of heart disease, research released Tuesday indicates.

“We have identified a new genetic trait that may predispose to heart disease risk,” said Dr. Ronald M. Krauss of the University of California, Berkeley.

Although Krauss has not pinpointed the gene that is responsible, he said its hallmark in the bloodstream is a substance called dense LDL.

About one-third of the population has relatively large amounts of dense LDL, a protein that binds itself to cholesterol, and those people are three times more likely than usual to suffer heart attacks, Krauss said.

Not all of those people will have heart attacks, and dense LDL itself may not even be the culprit. Instead, it may be a genetic marker, or signal, that they are at higher than usual risk.

Krauss said that such people may be unusually susceptible to the dangers of bad living habits that are often associated with heart trouble. These include obesity, a high-fat diet, lack of exercise and poorly controlled blood pressure.

Dense LDL can be measured with a blood test, he said.