Heart patients with advanced plaque formation in the heart's blood vessels have a more unfavorable blood lipid profile than those with less plaque, although traditional blood tests do not necessarily show a difference. Using an advanced analysis method based on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, we discovered, among other things, that the patients with the most advanced plaques have higher levels of small and dense LDL particles, and also that they have higher levels of cholesterol and other fatty substances in these particles. LDL cholesterol is often referred to as "the bad cholesterol", but it is probably primarily the small and dense LDL particles that can penetrate the artery wall and contribute to the calcification of the arteries.

The study includes 60 patients with suspected coronary atherosclerosis. They were examined and divided into three groups based on the extent of plaque formation in 14 segments of the coronary arteries, which supply the heart with blood. The total levels of triglycerides and HDL and LDL cholesterol were similar in all groups, but when we looked more closely at subfractions of the different particle types, we found differences that may be important for plaque formation. However, we also found that these differences were not present in patients using cholesterol-lowering statins.

In total, we analyzed the levels of more than 100 different fatty substances. The results suggest that measuring subfractions of lipoproteins may be useful for assessing cardiovascular risk in patients with suspected atherosclerosis.

Read the full research article in Physiological Genomics:
Small LDL subfractions are associated with coronary atherosclerosis despite no differences in conventional lipids

To the top