Cholesterol and Eurostroke

Cholesterol and Eurostroke

Recently, a pan-European study known as ‘Eurostroke’, published in 2002, asked the same question. The result: ‘This analysis of the Eurostroke project could not disclose an association of total cholesterol with fatal, non-fatal, hemorrhagic or ischaemic stroke: There are many other studies showing exactly the same thing. So, you have two conditions, stroke and heart disease, that are both fundamentally a form of arterial disease. Yet, raised cholesterol is a risk factor for one, but not the other.

Listed below is a slightly shortened list of risk factors for stroke from the American Stroke Association:

• High blood pressure
• Tobacco use
• Diabetes
• Carotid or other artery disease
• Other heart disease – people with coronary heart disease or heart failure have a higher risk of stroke
• Physical inactivity and obesity
• Excessive alcohol intake
• Some illegal drugs, intravenous drug abuse carries a high risk of stroke
• Cocaine use has been linked to strokes and heart attacks
• Increasing age
• Sex (gender): stroke is more common in men than in women
• Prior stroke or heart attack: someone who has had a stroke is at much higher risk of having another one.

If you have had a heart attack, you are at higher risk of having a stroke too Given that these are precisely the same risk factors as for heart disease (in fact, some of them are heart disease), where is cholesterol in this list? Even more critical for this discussion, how can lowering cholesterol with statins reduce the risk of stroke (which they do), if a raised cholesterol level is not a risk factor for stroke? This most certainly does not make sense. Actually, it would make perfect sense if you believe that any benefit gained from taking a statin has nothing to do with lowering cholesterol levels.

But this explanation cannot be allowed by the medicine world at large, or else the entire cholesterol hypothesis crumbles to the ground.This study, by the way, was immediately attacked from all sides. I think my favorite attack included the word ‘irresponsible: Things have come to a pretty pass when publishing a well-designed medical study in The Lancet is considered irresponsible. I mean, people might learn the truth and then there is no way of knowing what will happen. Panicking in the streets, law and order breaking down, the playing of loud and licentious music, egg yolks and meat pies consumed in public places …