Fasting and postprandial serum triglyceride levels in health and in ischemic heart disease

Abstract

Summary Fasting and 9 hour serum cholesterol and triglyceride measurements were made in 470 middle-aged men following the ingestion of a 70 g fat meal containing 131 I-labelled triolein. The amount of lipid-bound radioactivity in the 9-hour sample also was measured. Forty-two men who had clinical manifestations of IHD at the time of the test had significantly higher fasting and 9-hour serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels than those without disease but did not retain significantly more radio-active lipid at 9 hours. The correlation between fasting and 9-hour triglyceride levels was extremely high and indicated that a modified fat tolerance test, as utilized in this study, will yield no more information than a fasting triglyceride level as a means of differenti-ating between subjects with and without IHD. Although analysis of the data revealed that IHD was more prevalent in hyperglyceridemic than normoglyceridemic subjects, cholesterol levels also were higher in the former group than the latter. It was thus not possible on this basis to implicate one lipid more than the other. The lipid combination associated with the highest prevalence of IHD was a cholesterol level exceeding 275 mg/100 ml associated with a normal triglyceride level. Although IHD occurs in the presence of normal triglyceride levels, the possibility that various types of hyperglyceridemia may be related to the pathogenesis of IHD can not be discounted. It is hoped that the more accurate classification of abnormal hyperglyceridemic states possible with newer methods will help to define this relationship.