Researchers at UT Southwestern studied people who had carried naturally low LDL cholesterol their entire lives because of a broken copy of one gene, PCSK9, and compared their heart disease rates to everyone else's.
Black participants with a PCSK9 nonsense mutation had 28 percent lower LDL cholesterol and an 88 percent lower rate of coronary heart disease. White participants with a different PCSK9 variant had 15 percent lower LDL and a 47 percent lower rate, tracked over 15 years of follow-up.
The size of the protection, far larger than the modest drop in cholesterol seemed to justify, suggested that a lifetime of lower LDL mattered more than the number itself. The finding, with earlier PCSK9 genetics, helped spur an entire class of PCSK9-inhibiting drugs, now prescribed to lower cardiovascular risk.
Read the original study
A lifetime of low cholesterol, written into one gene.
Source
- Cohen, J. C., Boerwinkle, E., Mosley, T. H., & Hobbs, H. H. (2006). Sequence variations in PCSK9, low LDL, and protection against coronary heart disease. New England Journal of Medicine, 354(12), 1264–72. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa054013