You may soon be hearing a new term to assess your heart disease risk, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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You’ve probably already heard about total cholesterol and its cousins HDL and LDL, especially if you see a cardiologist. Now a new term called remnant cholesterol is entering the conversation, with a recent study concluding that it can increase accuracy in predicting heart disease risk. Seth Martin, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, explains.

Martin: This term ‘remnant cholesterol,’ has been used to basically capture the risk associated with triglyceride rich remnant lipoprotein. Another circulating substance that’s bad is triglycerides or blood fats. One way to capture the risk associated with them is remnant cholesterol. So this is very closely tied to triglyceride levels, but this is a new way of looking at things. The idea here is to take non-HDL and then subtract LDL cholesterol    :31

Martin says some people may already be seeing remnant cholesterol in their lab results. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.