A New Contradictory Study on Cholesterol

People have been told that increasing their HDL (good cholesterol) levels will increase the risk of heart disease. A new study says that’s not the case. The new study indicates HDL doesn’t counteract bad cholesterol. Instead, it doesn’t seem to do much, though low levels of HDL could be indicators of bad overall health or health habits.

The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, will sound familiar to the drug industry, which has repeatedly failed to design a pill that might improve patients’ lives by increasing HDL.

A decade ago, Pfizer spent more than $800 million to get the HDL-boosting medication torcetrapib into late-stage trials, only to find that more patients died on the drug than on placebo. Roche was next to fail when its drug, dalcetrapib, came up short in a 16,000-patient trial in 2012. And last year, Eli Lilly shut down a study testing its evacetrapib on 12,000 patients after discovering that the drug had no effect on heart attack and stroke.

Those drugs, called CETP inhibitors, are meant to interrupt the process that turns HDL into LDL cholesterol, its “bad” relative. And, in a sense, they work — Lilly’s pill boosted HDL by about 130 percent and slashed LDL by more than one-third. But, time after time, changing that ratio of good to bad cholesterol has failed to improve outcomes for patients.