Brian Cotgrove said:Without wishing to throw a spanner in the medical and scientific works so as to speak. May I just tell a factual story about my Father, he died in February 2001 at the age of 105 years, the cause of death as per the death certificate was "Old Age". <snip>
Brian, although that is an interesting story, nobody has ever said "all people with high cholesterol will die from heart disease".
Just the same, nobody says "all smokers will get lung cancer" or "all people that exercise will avoid heart attacks".
It is a relative risk thing. If you take 100 people with a cholesterol above 9, maybe (at a guess) 30 - 50 will have early cardiac deaths. If you put all 100 on cholesterol lowering drugs, you might drop that from 30 - 50 down to 10 and have 1 that gets a side effect. (Incidentally, you might prevent 2 from dying of blood stream infections and prevent 5 from getting dementia as these are other benefits that are now being found with these drugs).
That being said, you are right that many people overplay the importance of cholesterol levels. It needs to be taken in context of other cardiac risks like smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure and a family history. You also need to look at the breakdown of the various components in the cholesterol test (eg LDL versus HDL level) and whether the test was done after fasting for 12 hours (to make it more accurate).
Thus, if you take a group of fit & healthy 40 year olds that have high cholesterol but no other risks for cardiac disease, you would have to spend ~US$300,000 on cholesterol lowering drugs to save one life.
If you then take a group of hypertensive, diabetic, smokers with a high cholesterol level and a family history of cardiac disease, the cost to save one life would be far, far less.