Cholesterol Health Video

Video Transcript

DR. SAM ARMITAGE: Hyperlipidemia or high cholesterol is where you have too much cholesterol in your blood. It is a misconception to think that all cholesterol is bad, it's not. The human body makes cholesterol and we use cholesterol in all of our healthy cells. However, high cholesterol or elevated cholesterol is one of the contributing factors to heart disease, cardiovascular disease which lead to the leading cause of death in America, heart attacks and strokes. In people with very high cholesterol or familial cholesterol, they may even have some cholesterol deposits in the skin, sometimes on insides of the eyelids. On the top right there, you'll see some little yellowish deposits on certain people, but quite often high cholesterol especially moderately high cholesterol has no symptoms whatsoever. The only way that you'll usually find out if you have high cholesterol is from your physician. The definitions for high cholesterol have changed in recent years as we find out more and more what good cholesterol should be and we define that as by people living longer and having fewer heart attacks and strokes. The current recommendations are for total cholesterol to be below 200 mg/dL with a LDL or bad cholesterol less than 100, and an HDL or good cholesterol greater than 45. Treating high cholesterol is very important. The simplest and most effective means and most people like to try before they move on to medication is dietary and lifestyle changes. These include eating significantly less fats in the diet, increasing the amount of exercise that you get daily and losing weight. All of these can help to lower your bad cholesterol as well as raise your good cholesterol levels. It is important to get both of them in balance, not just to have just a little cholesterol. Young people, who are wanting to have a healthy lifestyle and to reduce the chances of developing high cholesterol and the dangers, thereby should start doing the things that we all know we should do which include maintain a healthy weight, exercise on a regular basis, eliminate most saturated fats from our diet and consult with your physician to check and see if your levels are already high. There are significant numbers of people who today, while very young and may look perfectly healthy, already have high cholesterol. The simplest way to determine if you have high cholesterol is to check with your doctor. In simple blood test and a few days, they will let you know whether you have high cholesterol or not and how bad it is. If it does require treatment and medication and quite often it does not, there are multiple classes of drugs out there. Some of the most important ones that many people with high cholesterol wound up taking are called the statin drugs. The statin drugs are often misconstrued as being a little scary. They're actually not. They're actually very very safe and there are very few people who cannot tolerate them.