As the article mentions, there is a theory that high cholesterol leads to heart disease.
Personally I no longer believe in the cholesterol theory of heart disease. Testing my cholesterol ins't something I worry about or have done.
For heart attack prevention I though the nitric oxide (NO) theory better. Basically raising NO levels help prevent a blood clot from blocking an artery leading to a heart attack. The guy that came up with the NO theory won a noble prize a number of years ago for his cardiac work. There are several ways to raise NO levels with diet, sun exposure, etc.
On the cholesterol theory for heart disease, I thought this a nice article by Dr.
Ezekiel Emanuel
He is one of the creators of Obamacare. As he writes many of the tests done during a typical annual physical, such as cholesterol testing have not been found to improve, prevent or extend a person's life.
Skip Your Annual Physical
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/skip-your-annual-physical.html
excerpt:
...Around 45 million Americans are likely to have a routine physical this year — just as they have for many years running. A poke here, a listen there, a few tubes of blood, maybe an X-ray, a few reassuring words about diet, exercise and not smoking from the doctor, all just to be sure everything is in good working order. Most think of it as the human equivalent of a 15,000-mile checkup and fluid change, which can uncover hidden problems and ensure longer engine life.
There is only one problem: From a health perspective, the annual physical exam is basically worthless.
In 2012, the Cochrane Collaboration, an international group of medical researchers who systematically review the world’s biomedical research, analyzed 14 randomized controlled trials with over 182,000 people followed for a median of nine years that sought to evaluate the benefits of routine, general health checkups — that is, visits to the physician for general health and not prompted by any particular symptom or complaint.
The unequivocal conclusion: the appointments are unlikely to be beneficial. Regardless of which screenings and tests were administered, studies of annual health exams dating from 1963 to 1999 show that the annual physicals did not reduce mortality overall or for specific causes of death from cancer or heart disease. And the checkups consume billions, although no one is sure exactly how many billions because of the challenge of measuring the additional screenings and follow-up tests.
This lack of evidence is the main reason the United States Preventive Services Task Force — an independent group of experts making evidence-based recommendations about the use of preventive services — does not have a recommendation on routine annual health checkups. The Canadian guidelines have recommended against these exams since 1979.
How can this be? There have been stories and studies in the past few years questioning the value of the physical, but neither patients nor doctors seem to want to hear the message....
