THE atherosclerosisThe constriction of blood flow due to the accumulation of fatty plaques in the arteries and the loss of flexibility of the arterial wall, is one of the main causes of cardiovascular mortality worldwide. This disease causes 85% of heart-related deaths in Spain.
Now, a new study is sounding the alarm: although until now this was considered a concern from middle age, the risk would begin to accumulate much earlier, even since childhood. This would imply that cholesterol levels – the main component of these plaques – must be controlled even since youthand that a specific reduction should not make us lower our guard.
The new work is by researchers at the University of Cambridge and is published in the journal Nature. Their conclusion is that high cholesterol at an early age, especially if fluctuateare more harmful than cholesterol which begins to accumulate later.
The team of Professor Ziad Mallat from the Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Institute for Heart and Lung Research worked with mouse models and took a new approach. Instead of feeding them a high-fat diet for several weeks to observe the accumulation of atherosclerosis, they tested the effects of this diet on different stages of your life.
“When I asked the atherosclerosis experts around us, none of them knew what the outcome would be,” Mallat says. “Some thought it wouldn’t make a difference, others thought it would change the level of risk. The fact is, we saw that an intermittent, high-fat diet When the mice were babies – for a week, with several weeks off, and another week – it was the worst option from a cardiovascular point of view.”
To extrapolate these results to human patients, they mined data from the Young Finns Study of Cardiovascular Risk with participants enrolled since the 1980s. More than 2,000 of them had undergone the study. ultrasound scans of your carotid arteries When They were 30 years oldand then at 50 years old. Researchers found that those who had higher cholesterol as children had greater accumulation of arterial fat.
“This means we should not put off controlling our cholesterol levels,” Mallat warns. “Atherosclerosis can be prevented by reducing cholesterol levels, but we need to start become aware much earlier “Furthermore, the additional damage caused by fluctuations in levels could explain why some people who take statins intermittently do not see their cardiovascular risk reduced.
“If you stop taking statin drugs, your body will be exposed to a cholesterol yo-yo. They don’t like it and apparently it interferes with their ability to prevent the accumulation of fatty plaques,” the researcher explains. This could be due to certain cells in the immune system, macrophages that cleans the arterial walls. By examining mouse models, researchers realized that alterations in cholesterol changed them physically, altering their gene expression and going from beneficial to increasing atherosclerosis.
