Andrew Huberman· PhD
when they look at LDL cholesterol and plot it so lifetime exposure to LDL cholesterol and plot it against the risk of heart disease I mean you can pretty much draw a straight line through it
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
when they look at LDL cholesterol and plot it so lifetime exposure to LDL cholesterol and plot it against the risk of heart disease I mean you can pretty much draw a straight line through it
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if you look at the high end of a melan randomization which is a type of study that looks at genetic polymorphisms that lead to in this case higher levels of LDL and genetic polymorphisms that lead to lower levels of LDL is there a relationship between LDL level and cardiovascular disease and indeed there is if you look at some of these studies
an important question is are LDL levels causal for heart attack or they simply correlative for heart attack so thanks to genetics we have a lot of genetic variants that can help explain the population variation in LDL levels once you have a good solid genetic instrument now what we can do is we can take a very large number of individuals and we can actually draw a bell curve for what their genetic LDL levels must look like
when you do mendelian randomization and you look at the genetic distribution of LDL cholesterol um you see that in fact there is causality
So a mandelian randomization says let's look at um genes in a population which we can assume are randomly assorted. That's the randomization part. And let's ask the question, will these genes be a proxy for a behavior that I want to study or something that I want to study where I can now use effectively observational tools to see if there's a difference. So again, you know, one example is um Mandelian randomization consistently shows that LDL cholesterol is causally associated with heart disease.
The MR data concerning LDL is consistent across the board.
these mandelian randomization studies I mean when they came out you look at the Life Time exposure you can draw a straight line through it I mean you can literally draw a straight line through amount of LDL exposure throughout the course of someone's life and the for heart disease so to me I had to change my opinion on that
about 10 years later here come all these mandilon randomization studies which um basically look at people who naturally secrete more or less LDL looking at lifetime exposure to LDL and that is what matters