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by safety1st
217 days ago
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Thanks for the astute and informed comment. So re-reading that portion of the article, it seems to me the answer to my question is not that any general or consensus guidelines are wrong, but that a company called Forward Health is doing lipid panels and providing an incorrect interpretation of the results. OP's LDL-C was 116 and this is on the very top end of what Forward Health's report says is OK, their report is wrong, this number is bad. All the stuff about needing to measure ApoB, needing a high end concierge doctor, and the very long article about measuring 10-20 different numbers and doing more exercise than the guidelines and being at risk of heart attack if you don't do amounts of exercise that the author consider unreasonable etc., some of this may have value, but this all seems to be a lot of very lengthy personal opinion by the techbro author of the post. The key insight is simply that your LDL-C becomes a cause for concern over 100, perhaps even over 70, and he was not as healthy as some tech company told him he was. No surprise there, I will talk to actual doctors instead of using services from "tech forward" startups any day of the week. |
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ApoB is still a reasonable thing to check though, at least once - Lp(a) is the primary cause of atherogenic particle counts being high when LDL-C isn't the culprit, and it's usually a genetic factor. Having a high Lp(a) will bounce your ApoB up and give you a better understanding of the total atherogenic particle load. You could have fine LDL-C or Lp(a) on their own but the total amount could be enough to be worrisome.
Lp(a) being problematic is definitely less common than it being more or less fine, but it's certainly not incredibly rare, either.