LDL Cholesterol and Brain Bleeding
Dr. David Brownstein, M.D., writes:
For years, we have been fed a narrative that a high level of LDL cholesterol is responsible for causing heart disease, and therefore lowering LDL cholesterol to the lowest level possible is a good thing.
The current recommendations are to reduce that number to less than 70 mg/dL. For a report that appeared in the journal Neurology, researchers studied the association between LDL cholesterol and brain bleeding risk. More than 96,000 subjects who had never had a stroke, heart attack, or cancer were studied.
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Averages of LDL cholesterol were correlated to the development of heart disease. Subjects with LDL cholesterol levels of 70 mg/dL to 99 mg/dL had a similar risk of heart disease as those with levels greater than 100 mg/dL.
Those with LDL levels less than 70 mg/dL had a significantly higher risk for developing heart disease than those with LDL levels of 70 mg/dL to 90 mg/dL.
For those with LDL levels of 50 mg/dL to 69 mg/dL, there was a 65% higher risk, and there was a 169% higher risk for those with LDL levels below 50 mg/dL.
I’ve been saying this for years: Using toxic medications to lower cholesterol levels as much as possible does not make sense. This study found a significantly higher risk of brain bleeds when LDL levels are lowered to the recommended ranges.
Statin drugs help about 1% of people who take them. Now we have new cholesterol-lowering medications that target LDL cholesterol receptors. They poison a crucial enzyme which results in a drastically lower LDL cholesterol.
But the side effects of doing this include serious, life-threatening infections, cancer, and now brain bleeds.
As I wrote in my book, “The Statin Disaster,” both statins and LDL-lowering medications are fraught with side effects and have poor efficacy.
If your cholesterol levels are too high, it is best to search for a reason why this is occurring and avoid taking toxic medications that simply fail most who take them.