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Wellness Wednesday for February 22, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm in my 40s. My LDL-c is rising despite an absurd effort on lifestyle diet/exercise stuff. It's now at about 130. I'm trying to convince my doctor to put me on statins to reduce it but he just reiterates lifestyle. He appears to be following guidelines. But what's the risk to lowering LDL-c anyway in spite of the guidelines? Trying to understand if he is resisting this outside of "if I deviate from guidelines and something bad happens I get sued and I'm not going to do research to figure out if it's worth it in your case".

What kind of guidelines are those? 130 is well outside of the reference interval, assuming you mean mg/dl. As far as I understand Statins are indicated for values above 85. Being more than 50% above that and still not recommending Statins sounds very strange.

I'm healthy and fit (BMI of ~23 and BF <15%) but I got put on statins when my LDL levels got 5.2/93.6.

Edit: Ignore this, I converted things wrong, see below.

Wow, what country do you live in? Do you have any specific risk factors?

I live in Sweden, no risk factors.

Edit: I used the wrong conversion table! Sorry!

My LDL when I got put on statins was 200 mg/dl, not 94.

The upper bound of the reference interval is about 180, not 130.