The raison d'etre of this website is to provide you with hard scientific information which may help you make informed decisions in your quest for health (so far I have blogged concise summaries of over 1,500 scientific studies and have had three books published).

My research is mainly focused on the effects of cholesterol, saturated fat and statin drugs on health. If you know anyone who is worried about their cholesterol levels and heart disease, or has been told to take statin drugs you could send them a link to this website, and to my statin or cholesterol or heart disease books.

David Evans

Independent Health Researcher

Friday 16 December 2011

Low levels of cholesterol are predictive of higher rates of death in patients with end-stage renal disease

This study was published in Nephron Clinical Practice 2011;119(3):c214-9

Study title and authors:
Reverse epidemiology of lipid-death associations in a cohort of end-stage renal disease patients.
Bowden RG, La Bounty P, Shelmadine B, Beaujean AA, Wilson RL, Hebert S.
School of Education, Baylor University, Waco, Tex., USA.

This study can be accessed at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21832847

End-stage kidney disease is the complete or almost complete failure of the kidneys to work. Reverse epidemiology is a term which says that obesity and high cholesterol may be protective and associated with greater survival in disease.

The purpose of this study was to determine if there are reverse epidemiological associations between cholesterol and mortality in end-stage renal disease patients. 438 patients with end-stage renal disease were tracked for 36 months.

The study found that low levels of cholesterol (including the so called "bad" LDL cholesterol) were predictive of higher rates of death in patients with end-stage renal disease.