Contrasting Evidences Between High Cholesterol Levels and The Risk of Cardiovascular Disease: A Review

Introduction: The cholesterol hypothesis had been kept alive for decades by reviewers who used statistics that excluded the results from unsuccessful trials and ignored numerous contradictory observations. High dietary cholesterol intake had been associated with development of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and mortality, for over several decades, without a direct link between the CVD and high serum cholesterol level. Hence, people avoided healthy cholesterol-rich diets due to the fear of developing CVD. The relationship between elevated plasma cholesterol and CVD and criteria for appropriate methods for screening patients with elevated cholesterol had remained a source of medical debates. Lack of decrease in overall mortality rates in patients without clinical coronary disease in whom aggressive lowering of cholesterol was achieved might have contributed to the lack of consensus on this most important issue. Methodology: With information derived from search engines, such as Elsevier, Springer, PubMed, Science Direct, Medline, Google Scholar and a library search for articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Results: Several research results showed that association between total serum cholesterol, its components and CVD is weak, absent or inverse implying that consuming healthy high cholesterol diets may not be harmful to health. Conclusion: This review provides evidence contrasting the links between elevated plasma cholesterol and CVD, and demonstrated that elevated cholesterol concentrations, rather, improve quality of life and life expectancy. In addition, most prevalent methods for cholesterol quantification in biological samples and foods, utilizing new technologies, such as Ambient Ionization Mass Spectrometry are summarized, along with other components of cholesterol. Keywords: Cholesterol, CVD, Quantification