Lipid hypothesis
hypothesis
The lipid hypothesis (also known as the cholesterol hypothesis) is a medical theory postulating a link between blood cholesterol levels and the occurrence of cardiovascular disease. A summary from 1976 described it as: "measures used to lower the plasma lipids in patients with hyperlipidemia will lead to reductions in new events of coronary heart disease". It states, more concisely, that "decreasing blood cholesterol [...] significantly reduces coronary heart disease".
As of 2023, there is international clinical acceptance of the lipid hypothesis.
The lipid hypothesis concerns blood cholesterol, which is not directly governed by dietary cholesterol but is influenced by it, albeit in ways that vary among individuals.
History
In 1856, the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow first described lipid accumulation in arterial walls. However, the initial connection between arteriosclerosis and dietary cholesterol would not be established until the research of Russian pathologist Nikolay Anichkov, prior to World War I. In 1913, a study by Anichkov showed that rabbits fed a high cholesterol diet developed lesions in their arteries similar to atherosclerosis, suggesting a role for cholesterol in atherogenesis.
Dutch physician Cornelis de Langen noted the correlation between nutritional cholesterol intake and incidence of gallstones in Javanese people in 1916. de Langen showed that the traditional Javanese diet, poor in cholesterol and other lipids, was associated with a low level of blood cholesterol and low incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD), while the prevalence of CVD in Europeans living in Java on a Western diet was higher. Since de Langen published his results only in Dutch, his work remained unknown to most of the international scientific community until the 1940s and 1950s.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lipid hypothesis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.