Cholesterol: What You Need To Know

From striking new studies and leading specialists, the latest information.

- Anita Bartholomew & Kathakoli Dasgupta

Sometime in early 2014, Mumbai-based Lerrick Ferrao, now 37, felt a mild pain in his chest. It was gone in a few minutes. It returned the following morning—again subsiding soon after. This continued through the day. He decided to consult his family doctor, because he knew he had a family history of heart disease. His brother had undergone a bypass surgery two years earlier and his mother had been fitted with a pacemaker the year before. The ECG reports were normal, so the pain was shrugged off as a muscular spasm. But one early morning in July, he felt a shooting pain in his chest soon after he woke up. “It was intense and radiated into my jaw. I was sweating profusely even while it was pleasantly cool in the Mumbai rains. I felt so sick that I threw up. And then I collapsed,” recalls Lerrick.

The blackout lasted a few seconds. “I recovered and had tea, still thinking it had nothing to do with my heart, attributing it to fatigue because I hadn’t slept very well the previous night,” he says. But his wife got worried and phoned his mother who came prepared to take him to the hospital for a check-up. He still didn’t think there was anything to ‘fuss’ about, but gave in.

Lerrick didn’t believe it then, but inside the walls of the arteries leading to his heart, cholesterol had been building up. Over time, this cholesterol had hardened into a substance called plaque, creating a condition called atherosclerosis. These plaques narrowed the space through which his blood flowed.