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Circulating lipid levels and risk of coronary artery disease in a large group of patients undergoing coronary angiography

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Abstract

A main underlying pathology of coronary artery disease is the deposition of cholesterol in the arteries supplying blood to the heart that leads to stenosis and myocardial infarction. We tested if dyslipidemia is a risk factor for coronary artery disease in the Lebanese population, and studied the role of the total cholesterol/HDL cholesterol (TC/HDL-C) ratio as a biological marker of coronary artery disease. We recruited 6,180 Lebanese patients undergoing cardiac catheterization. We conducted a cross-sectional association study between TC/HDL-C ratio and the number and type of vessels occluded in catheterized patients by controlling for confounding effects. The TC/HDL-C ratio ≥4 significantly predicts ≥50 % stenosis in all vessels individually with the odds ratio (OR) ranging from 1.22 to 1.92. The OR increased with increasing number of ≥50 % stenotic vessels (1.39 for 2 vessels and 1.64 for 3–4 vessels), as did risk due to diabetes, CAD family history, gender, and age. The younger than average age of onset subgroup shows a pronounced increase in risk for occlusion of the left main coronary artery due to TC/HDL-C ≥4 (OR 3.26). In conclusion, low levels of HDL-cholesterol and high levels TC/HDL-C ratio are strong biological markers of disease occurrence and severity in the Lebanese population.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Nour Moukalled and Bariaa Khalil for their help with subject recruitment and data collection. We thank the Rafic Hariri University Hospital, the Saint Georges Hospital, and the “Centre Hospitalier du Nord” for their collaboration and support. This study is part of the FGENTCARD Consortium. It is partly supported by the Wellcome Trust core award Grant Number 075491/Z/04 and by a grant from the European Commission (FGENTCARD, LSHG-CT-2006-037683). Dominique Gauguier holds a Wellcome Trust senior fellowship in basic biomedical science (057733).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bioinformatics and Pattern Discovery, IBM T. J. Watson Research Centre, New York, NY, USA

    Daniel E. Platt

  2. Lebanese American University, School of Medicine, Beirut, Lebanon

    Michella Ghassibe-Sabbagh, Sonia Youhanna, Angelique K. Salloum, Marc Haber, Jihane Romanos, Bouchra Doueihy, Francis Mouzaya, Hana Sbeite, Mary E. Deeb, Elie Chammas, Hamid el Bayeh & Pierre A. Zalloua

  3. CEA-Genomics Institute, Centre National de Génotypage, Evry, France

    Jörg Hager

  4. The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jean-Baptiste Cazier & Dominique Gauguier

  5. Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH), Paris, France

    Yoichiro Kamatani

  6. Division of Cardiology, Rafic Hariri University Hospital, Beirut, Lebanon

    Samer Kibbani

  7. Lebanese American University, School of Arts and Sciences, Beirut, Lebanon

    Georges Khazen

  8. INSERM, UMRS872, Centre de Recherche des Cordeliers, Paris, France

    Dominique Gauguier

  9. Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA

    Pierre A. Zalloua

  10. Division of Cardiology, Department of Internal Medicine, American University of Beirut, P.O. Box 11-0236, Riad-El-Solh Beirut, 1107 2020, Beirut, Lebanon

    Antoine B. Abchee

Authors
  1. Daniel E. Platt
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  2. Michella Ghassibe-Sabbagh
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  8. Marc Haber
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  18. Dominique Gauguier
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Consortia

FGENTCARD Consortium

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antoine B. Abchee.

Additional information

The members of the FGENTCARD Consortium is provided in the Appendix.

Daniel E. Platt and Michella Ghassibe-Sabbagh contributed equally to this study.

Appendix: FGENTCARD Consortium

Appendix: FGENTCARD Consortium

Dominique Gauguier, Jean-Baptiste Cazier, The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, UK; Mark Lathrop, Jörg Hager, CEA-Genomics Institute, Centre National de Génotypage, Evry, France; Jeremy K. Nicholson, Imperial College London, UK; Pierre Zalloua, Lebanese American University, School of Medicine, Beirut, Lebanon; Ulla Grove Sidelmann, Novo Nordisk, Måløv, Denmark; Frank Bonner, Metabometrix Ltd, London, UK.

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Platt, D.E., Ghassibe-Sabbagh, M., Youhanna, S. et al. Circulating lipid levels and risk of coronary artery disease in a large group of patients undergoing coronary angiography. J Thromb Thrombolysis 39, 15–22 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11239-014-1069-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11239-014-1069-2

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