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(Circulation. 2001;104:1881.)
© 2001 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial

Cholesterol in Vascular and Valvular Calcification

Linda L. Demer, MD, PhD

From the Departments of Medicine and Physiology, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, Calif.

Correspondence to Linda L. Demer, MD, PhD, Maud Cady Guthman Professor of Medicine and Physiology, Vice Chair, Department of Medicine, UCLA School of Medicine, Mail Box 951679, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1679.

Key Words: Editorials • atherosclerosis • calcium • lipids

In the early 1990s, the late Jeff Hoeg had the foresight to ask whether vascular calcification relates to the duration and severity of exposure to cholesterol. In a group of homozygous hyperlipidemic patients for whom detailed records of cholesterol levels were available over a long period of time, he and his colleagues found that coronary calcification scores by ultrafast computed tomographic scanning correlated significantly with the cholesterol year product.¹ Studies that lack long-term cholesterol history may miss a correlation between lipids and calcification, because current treatments so dramatically change cholesterol levels as to make them unrepresentative of long-term exposure.

See p 1927

In the present issue of Circulation, Pohle et al² successfully overcame these difficulties by studying the rate of change in calcification as a function of change in lipid levels, excluding patients in whom treatment was altered during the study period. These investigators found that both coronary calcification and aortic valve calcification progress more rapidly in subjects with levels of LDL >130 mg/dL. This finding dovetails with those of Callister et al,³ who discovered that patients who successfully lowered their cholesterol levels with lipid-lowering agents significantly reduced the progression of coronary calcification. In a large population of young subjects, the risk factor that correlated most significantly with coronary calcification was LDL cholesterol.⁴ This relation was stronger than the correlation with age, smoking, fasting insulin, blood pressure, or male sex.⁴ In another study of asymptomatic outpatients, LDL cholesterol was the only risk factor correlating with progression of coronary calcification . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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