Increased Risk Of Stroke And Heart Attack With Irregular Schedules
For many workers on holiday work schedules, overnight shifts, swing shifts and other irregular work schedules, getting enough rest and living a healthy lifestyle can be difficult. New research suggests that in addition to increasing worker discomfort and inconvenience, however, it can also be dangerous. People who work these irregular schedules have a greatly increased risk ofdiabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and other negative health indicators, which could lead to more heart attacks and strokes.
According to a large-scale study published in the British Medical Journal, people who work the graveyard shift, as well as workers who have split shifts and unreliable schedules, suffer from an increased risk of vascular disease, as well as previously-known health indicators like diabetes. This study looked at 34 previous studies including a total population of more than two million people working non-standard schedules.
Many people on these shifts also have trouble getting an adequate diet since their hours conflict with normal mealtimes. They end up eating large amounts of unhealthy convenience foods instead. A large percentage of overnight and split shift workers also have trouble getting enough physical activity, which is one of the biggest risk factors for poor health.
What Are The Controllable And Uncontrollable Risk Factors For High Cholesterol
People can control their lifestyle choices and maximize their chances of controlling high cholesterol levels by eating a healthy diet, exercising, controlling their weight, and avoiding or quitting smoking.
However, there are some conditions that are beyond an individuals control. Family history and genetic predisposition, high cholesterol, aging , and diseases that cause the liver to make more cholesterol or interfere with its metabolism are all risk factors for high cholesterol. These risks can be minimized by adopting a healthier lifestyle but may require the use of cholesterol-lowering medications.
Hdl Cholesterol Or Good Cholesterol
HDL cholesterol is sometimes called good cholesterol. It helps return LDL cholesterol to your liver to be removed from your body. This helps prevent cholesterol plaque from building up in your arteries.
When you have healthy levels of HDL cholesterol, it can help lower your risk of blood clots, heart disease, and stroke.
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What Causes High Cholesterol
As mentioned before high levels of cholesterol may have a substantial impact on our overall life. So it’s worth knowing what are the causes of high cholesterol.
Hypercholesterolemia is often caused by thyroid insufficiency, type 2 diabetes and obesity. It may also be caused by genetic disorders, such as familial hypercholesterolemia, which is not that rare – about 0.3% of the population have mutations causing high LDL-cholesterol!
Nevertheless, the most important factor influencing your lipid and cholesterol levels is your lifestyle! Diet has an impact on cholesterol levels, but the size of its impact differs between individual patients. The results of meta-analysis Does Dietary Cholesterol Matter? published in 2016 reveal that the intake of high-cholesterol food causes an increase in serum cholesterol levels. Also trans fatty acids have a strong atherogenic potential – they reduce levels of HDL-cholesterol while increasing levels of LDL-cholesterol .
If you are in the risk group of hipercholesterolemia, check out blood sugar converter and calorie calculator, and start living healthier!
How Can Foods Help Lower Cholesterol
People can often reduce their cholesterol levels dramatically by changing the foods they eat. Diets high in saturated fats, trans fats, and cholesterolfound in meat, dairy products, and eggsraise cholesterol levels, which increases heart attack risk. Foods high in saturated fat are especially dangerous because they can trigger the body to produce extra cholesterol.
Plants do the opposite. They are very low in saturated fat and free of cholesterol. Plants are also rich in soluble fiber, which helps lower cholesterol. Soluble fiber slows the absorption of cholesterol and reduces the amount of cholesterol the liver produces. Oatmeal, barley, beans, and some fruits and vegetables are all good sources of soluble fiber.
It is important to continue to work closely with your health care provider to monitor your health and manage medications, even as you make dietary changes.
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Causes Of High Cholesterol
Eating too many foods that are high in cholesterol, saturated fats, and trans fats may increase your risk of developing high cholesterol. Living with obesity can also increase your risk. Other lifestyle factors that can contribute to high cholesterol include inactivity and smoking.
Your genetics can also affect your chances of developing high cholesterol. Genes are passed down from parents to children. Certain genes instruct your body on how to process cholesterol and fats. If your parents have high cholesterol, you may be at a greater risk of having it too.
In rare cases, high cholesterol is caused by familial hypercholesterolemia. This genetic disorder prevents your body from removing LDL. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute , most adults with this condition have total cholesterol levels above 300 milligrams per deciliter and LDL levels above 200 milligrams per deciliter.
Other health conditions, such as diabetes and hypothyroidism, may also increase your risk of developing high cholesterol and related complications.
Cholesterol Levels For Children
By comparison, acceptable levels of total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol in children are different.
- An acceptable range of total cholesterol for a child is less than 170 mg/dL. Borderline high total cholesterol for a child ranges from 170 to 199 mg/dL. Any reading of total cholesterol over 200 in a child is too high.
- A childs LDL cholesterol levels should also be lower than an adults. The optimal range of LDL cholesterol for a child is less than 110 mg/dL. Borderline high is from 110 to 129 mg/dL while high is over 130 mg/dL.
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Make Changes In The Kitchen
Use your diet to help lower your LDL cholesterol and raise your HDL cholesterol.
For the biggest impact, choose foods that are low in saturated fats and trans fats, and high in fiber, antioxidants, and omega-3 fatty acids. Whole grains, beans, apples, pears, oatmeal, salmon, walnuts, and olive oil are excellent heart-healthy choices.
Here are some more diet tips to help you lower your cholesterol:
Make meat lean. Cut back on red meats that are high in saturated fat and cholesterol, and choose only lean meats with very little visible fat. Examples of lean beef include London broil, eye of round, and filet mignon. Avoid processed meats like bacon and sausage, which are linked to higher odds of heart disease and diabetes.
Remove skin from poultry. That’s where much of the fat is.
Eat more seafood. It usually has less fat than other meat. The American Heart Association recommends eating two servings of fatty fish each week for heart health. Those fish are good sources of omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for you.
Limit saturated fat. These are found in whole-fat dairy products, mayonnaise, and hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils or fats . These products may also contain trans fats, which can raise your cholesterol level.
Add fiber with plant foods. Good sources include grapefruits, apples, beans and other legumes, barley, carrots, cabbage, and oatmeal.
Onceyou Know Your Risk
Once the risk calculator has determined your risk how likely it is that you will have a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years your doctor can decide whether treatment is needed and, if so, together you can develop a treatment plan, Dr. Laffin says.
If you do need treatment, the medication prescribed will usually be a statin drug. According to the American Heart Association , statins are a first-line treatment that directly reduce the risk for heart attack or stroke from bad cholesterol.
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What Is A High Triglyceride Level
High triglycerides can be dangerous to your health. Unfortunately, high triglycerides, like high cholesterol, rarely causes symptoms. Its vital to get routine lipid blood tests to check cholesterol numbers.
Your healthcare provider determines total cholesterol by looking at a combination of triglycerides, HDL and LDL numbers. If your triglycerides and LDL cholesterol are high, but your HDL is low, you have an increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
For the most accurate reading, you should fast 8 to 12 hours before a lipid blood test. A healthy number for triglycerides is below 150 milligrams per deciliter .
Your healthcare provider classifies high triglyceride levels as:
- Mild: 150-199 mg/dL.
- Severe: Greater than 500 mg/dL.
Are Statins Safe For Over 70s
Statins should be taken with caution if youre at an increased risk of developing a rare side effect called myopathy, which is where the tissues of your muscles become damaged and painful. Severe myopathy can lead to kidney damage. Things that can increase this risk include: being over 70 years old.
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What Foods Cause High Cholesterol
Eating foods high in saturated fats and trans fats can raise your LDL and total cholesterol levels. Saturated fats are found in red meats, full-fat dairy products, and many processed foods. Trans fats are sometimes listed on food labels as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Trans fats are so unhealthy that the Food and Drug Administration has actually banned them as of January 1, 2021. Foods that can contribute to high cholesterol include:
Fatty beef, lamb, or pork
Poultry with skin
Butter, cheese, and other dairy products made with whole milk
Lard and shortening
A diet that helps you lower your cholesterol can include:
Plenty of vegetables and fruits
Avocados
Tree nuts like almonds, walnuts, and pecans
Fatty fish like salmon, trout, tuna, mackerel, herring, and sardines
High-fiber foods like oatmeal and oat bran
Low-fat dairy foods
Some foods like margarine, yogurt, and orange juice can have sterols or stanols added to them. These plant-based substances help your body block the absorption of cholesterol from your diet and lower LDL levels.
What Is A Good Cholesterol Level
To understand cholesterol levels, it is first helpful to understand how cholesterol is measured. Cholesterol is not floating around in your bloodstream by itself. If it was, it would just be globs of fat that would not be able to use. For cholesterol to be useful, it attaches to proteins before it enters the blood. These combinations of cholesterol and proteins are called lipoproteins. There are several types of lipoproteins, but the two that receive the most attention are:
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Tactics To Reduce Cholesterol Quickly
For most of us, there’s really no need to pack our medicine cabinets with pills to reduce cholesterol levels. Natural, lifestyle-based strategies have proven extraordinarily effective in reducing cholesterol quickly and permanently.
Get the top 5 food and fitness tips recommended by the doctors, dietitians, exercise experts, and other faculty at the Pritikin Longevity Center. Pritikin has been helping people lower cholesterol levels since 1975.
Did you know that for every 10% drop in your cholesterol level, your heart attack risk drops by 20% to 30%? Theres more good news: Most of us can reduce cholesterol quickly, and without the need for medications. Simple lifestyle strategies can be very powerful.
Thats what several studies on thousands following the Pritikin Program of diet and exercise have found. Within three weeks, people were able to lower their cholesterol levels on average 23%, which translates into a 46% to 69% drop in heart attack risk.1
Total Cholesterol Hdl Ldl And Triglycerides
Our cholesterol ratio calculator takes into account four basic blood test results. All recommended levels are according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute within the National Institutes of Health.
You only need to input three of your results – they are dependent on each other according to the formula:
total cholesterol = HDL + LDL + 0.2 * triglycerides
- Desirable: Less than 200 mg/dL
- Borderline high: 200 – 239 mg/dL
- High: 240 mg/dL and above
- Optimal: 60 mg/dL and above
- Borderline: 40 – 59 mg/dL
- Risk of heart disease: Less than 40 mg/dL
- Optimal: Less than 100 mg/dL
- Near optimal/above optimal: 100 – 129 mg/dL
- Borderline high: 130 – 159 mg/dL
- High: 160 – 189 mg/dL
- Very high: 190 mg/dL and above
- Normal: Less than 150 mg/dL
- Borderline high: 150 – 199 mg/dL
- High: 200 – 499 mg/dL
- Very high: 500 mg/dL or above
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Does Drinking Coffee Raise Your Cholesterol
While coffee does not contain cholesterol, it can affect cholesterol levels. The diterpenes in coffee suppress the bodys production of substances involved in cholesterol breakdown, which causes cholesterol to increase. Specifically, coffee diterpenes may cause an increase in total cholesterol and LDL levels.
Are You Serious About Reducing Cholesterol
If making healthy changes on your own has been a challenge, it may be time to bring in the professionals! Our team of physicians, nutritionists, exercise experts, psychologists, and chefs – specialize in helping people just like you reduce medication and take contol of their health. A vacation at Pritikin will change your life!
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Search Strategy Eligibility Criteria And Study Selection
A systematic literature search was conducted in the electronic databases PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus, from January 2020 to January 2021, using the following terms and their combination: cholesterol or LDL or low-density lipoprotein or HDL or high-density lipoprotein or triglycerides and COVID-19 or Coronavirus disease-2019 . Abstracts were screened independently by two investigators. If relevant, the full text of the articles were independently reviewed. The references of the retrieved articles were also reviewed to identify additional studies. Eligibility criteria included assessment of total cholesterol and/or LDL-cholesterol and/or HDL-cholesterol and/or triglyceride concentrations in COVID-19 patients investigation of COVID-19 patients with different disease severity, based on current clinical guidelines or admission to the Intensive Care Unit , or survival status, adult patients, 10 subjects, English language, and full-text available. The references of the retrieved articles and reviews were also searched to identify additional studies. Any disagreement between the reviewers was resolved by a third investigator. We used the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale to assess study quality, with a score 6 indicating high quality .
What Does The Test Result Mean
In general, healthy lipid levels help to maintain a healthy heart and lower the risk of heart attack or stroke. A healthcare practitioner will take into consideration total cholesterol results and the other components of a lipid profile as well as other risk factors to help determine a person’s overall risk of heart disease, whether treatment is necessary and, if so, which treatment will best help to lower the person’s risk.
In 2002, the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III provided the guidelines for evaluating lipid levels and determining treatment. However, in 2013, the ACC and AHA issued guidelines for adults that made recommendations on who should receive cholesterol-lowing therapy. .
However, use of the updated guidelines remains controversial. Many still use the older guidelines from the NCEP ATP III to evaluate lipid levels and cardiovascular disease risk:
For adults, in a routine setting where testing is done to screen for risk, the test results are grouped in three categories of risk:
For children and adolescents:
- A cholesterol below 170 mg/dL is acceptable.
- A result of 170-199 mg/dL is borderline.
- A total cholesterol reading greater than or equal to 200 mg/dL is considered high.
For young adults:
- A cholesterol below 190 mg/dL is acceptable.
- A result of 190-224 mg/dL is borderline.
- A total cholesterol greater than or equal to 225 mg/dL is considered high.
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How Do Triglycerides Circulate In The Blood
Pure cholesterol cannot mix with or dissolve in the blood. Instead, the liver packages cholesterol with triglycerides and proteins called lipoproteins. The lipoproteins move this fatty mixture to areas throughout the body.
Types of these lipoproteins include very low-density lipoproteins , high-density lipoproteins and low-density lipoproteins .
What Are Triglycerides
Triglycerides are a type of fat found in your blood.
Your liver makes triglycerides. You also get them through many of the foods you eat. In fact, after you eat, any extra calories that your body doesnt need right away are converted into triglycerides.
These fatty substances are stored in fat cells. They are later released and circulate the bloodstream to be used as energy by cells. But as with LDL cholesterol, too much can be harmful. Most dietary fats are triglycerides.
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When Is It Ordered
Adults
Cholesterol testing is recommended as a screening test to be done for all adults with no risk factors for heart disease at least once every four to six years. It is frequently done in conjunction with a routine physical exam.
Cholesterol is tested at more frequent intervals when a person has one or more risk factors for heart disease. Major risk factors include:
Youth
Screening for high cholesterol as part of a lipid profile is recommended for children and young adults. They should be tested once between the ages of 9 and 11 and then again between the ages of 17 and 21. Earlier and more frequent screening with a lipid profile is recommended for children and youths who are at an increased risk of developing heart disease as adults. Some of the risk factors are similar to those in adults and include a family history of heart disease or health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or being overweight. When the youth’s body mass index is at or above the 85th percentile, cholesterol testing is recommended. For an obese youth , laboratory tests to measure cholesterol levels may be recommended every 2 years.
Monitoring