From: Leslie Schultz (nfld1-1.nas.mr.net)
Subject: Re: cholesterol too low?
Date: August 4, 2000 at 4:01 am PST

In Reply to: Re: cholesterol too low? posted by Dr. Neal Pinckney on June 20, 2000 at 12:26 am:

Dear Dr. Pinckney:

Your statistics are helpful to me, and I would appreciate citations to send on to the internist I have just seen. He said he would read them with interest.

I first had my cholesterol check in 1986 at age 25 to establish a baseline. It was 101. In December 1999, it was 102 (LDL 46/HDL 46). In July 2000, it dropped to 87 (HDL 55 LDL 23). An internist at my clinic (who had never met me) was alarmed and asked to meet with me at once to rule out "a possible malignancy." I felt wonderfully well, am a vegetarian and a yoga teacher, losing weight postpartum by design, eating lots of raw food, getting aeorbic exercise, etc. I agreed to meet with him, though. After we talked a bit, he felt no need to examine me or to do additional blood work, but he said my levels were three standard deviations out from normal, that very little was known about healthy people with cholesterol levels as low as mine. I showed him the correspondence above, and he was interested in citations.

Can you help? Thanks!