The British Heart Foundation and Familial Hypercholesterolemia

Executive summary

Please login to view this content
Introduction

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Dr David Diamond present three times in the past year. I have found the most thought provoking parts of his presentations to be on Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH). At a conference in California on February 2nd, 2020, David reiterated some important, and little known, facts about FH. He also used a quotation about FH with which I am familiar. It comes from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and it says: “If you don’t have treatment, 1 in 2 men and nearly 1 in 3 women with FH will develop coronary heart disease by the age of 55” (Ref 1).

Hearing David use this quotation reminded me that I had exchanged emails with the BHF about this statement back in February 2018. I checked the BHF literature when I got home, and their errors/falsehoods – not sure what to call this – have still not been corrected. I’ll report the exchange in full later in this note. First, let’s remind ourselves of what FH is and what the evidence is for the risk with which it is associated.

Familial Hypercholesterolemia

FH is a genetic condition caused by a gene defect on chromosome 19. The defect impairs the body’s ability to remove low density lipoproteins (LDL) from the blood stream, resulting in consistently high levels of LDL (and thus the cholesterol contained therein). There are two types of FH: Heterozygous FH is found in approximately 1 in 500 people; Homozygous FH is even rarer, occurring in approximately 1 in a million births (Ref 2).

 

The rest of this article is available to site subscribers, who get access to all articles plus a weekly newsletter.
To continue reading, please login below or sign up for a subscription. Thank you.