J Lipid Res
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Comparative Study
Comparison of apolipoprotein B to cholesterol in low density lipoproteins of patients with coronary heart disease.
This study was carried out to determine whether patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) have an unusually high level of apolipoprotein B (apoB) relative to cholesterol (C) in low density lipoproteins (LDL). Seven groups of men were studied. Seventy-two with normolipidemia (NLP) had CHD documented on clinical grounds; another 34 NLP patients had proven coronary artery disease (CAD) by angiography (greater than 50% occlusion of two or three coronary arteries). ⋯ HTG patients with CHD and CAD however tended to have higher LDL-apoB levels, and their LDL-apoB/C ratios were higher on average than normal. Nevertheless, among all coronary groups, there were no sizable subgroups with elevated LDL-apoB; only about 11% of all coronary patients had LDL-apoB levels over 120 mg/dl (compared to 8% for normo- and hypertensive controls of middle age). The data of this study therefore suggest that LDL-apoB may not prove to be a better indicator of coronary risk in normolipidemic people, but LDL-apoB could be a superior predictor of risk in HTG patients.