If many people are concerned with lowering their bad cholesterol levels, taking steps to increase good cholesterol is something which is a lot less known about. And for good reason, as the only drug which can boost HDL cholesterol levels causes a skin flushing which is troublesome to say the least. During his post-doctoral studies in Germany, Julien Hanson and his colleagues have put their fingers on the causes of this flushing, and this discovery opens up avenues to designing new medicaments which will no longer make patients blush.

The major cause of death throughout the world, cardiovascular diseases constitute an ensemble of disorders which affect the heart and the blood vessels. According to the Belgian Cardiology League, around 30% of the section of the population aged between 34 and 84 have a greater than 15% risk of having a major cardio or cerebro-vascular attack within 10 years. The World Health Organisation (WHO) for its part estimates that over 23.6 million people will die of a cardiovascular disease from now until the year 2030. Fighting against these diseases has thus become one of the public health priorities. Except for age, gender and heredity, there are cardiovascular risk factors each one of us can act upon in order to reduce the risk of one day being subject to this type of disease.

Amongst the heart’s primary tormentors are in particular numbered smoking, hypertension, a sedentary lifestyle, being overweight, and…cholesterol. Or rather what is sometimes called, though the language is being abused, ‘bad’ cholesterol.

Cholesterol, good or bad? It’s a question of apoprotein!

Why do we talk of good or bad protein? In reality cholesterol is neither good nor bad. But this lipid (fat), which plays a crucial role in the formation of the membranes of our cells and numerous hormones, is hardly to be found in free form. In effect it links up with transport proteins, called apoproteins, to form a lipoprotein which is soluble in the blood. Depending on the type of apoprotein it links itself to, the cholesterol can form lipoproteins of two major types: LDL (low density lipoproteins) or HDL (high density lipoproteins). When we talk of bad or good cholesterol it is more precisely these lipoproteins we are discussing.