Here's How to Get More 'Good' Cholesterol

July 28, 2006 — -- Doctors aren't the only ones telling people to lower their cholesterol. Television commercials also tout cereals -- from Quaker to Kellogg's -- and medications that encourage viewers to become heart healthy and promise to lower LDL, the "bad" cholesterol.

But there is another type of cholesterol that physicians agree is important to raise -- HDL, or the "good" cholesterol.

HDL works in opposition to LDL. Instead of increasing the risk of heart disease, it can help prevent heart attacks and stroke.

Doctors have known this for more than a decade, but cardiologists have recently started paying more attention to HDL after a study showed that giving doses of it could reverse plaque buildup in arteries, said Dr. Robert Rosenson, a preventive cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago and a member of the American College of Cardiologists' prevention committee.

For the first time, the study showed how raising HDL is likely as important as lowering LDL when it comes to reducing the risk of heart attack, Rosenson said.

And just as too many Americans have high levels of so-called bad cholesterol, too few have low levels of good cholesterol. The latest statistics from the American Heart Association show that as many as one in three adult men and one in 10 adult women have low HDL cholesterol.

Therefore, "the next big hope is raising HDL," said Dr. Greg Brown, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Hope may lie with a new drug, torcetrapib, that raises HDL. It has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but Dr. Steven Nissen said the trials of the drug were "one of the most watched." He is interim chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic and president of the American College of Cardiology.

"If [torcetrapib] works, it'll be a revolution," said Nissen, who's also the principal investigator in an ongoing trial of the medication. Early trials of the drug have resulted in a 50 to 60 percent increase in HDL levels, he said.