No association between ‘bad cholesterol’ and elderly deaths

An international team of experts has found that older people with high levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL-C) live as long, and often longer, than their peers with low levels of LDL-C. The findings, resulting from an analysis of past studies involving more than 68,000 participants over 60 years of age, call into question the ‘cholesterol hypothesis’ which suggests people with high cholesterol are at risk of dying and need statin drugs to lower their cholesterol.