Race-Dependent Association of High- Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol Levels With Incident Coronary Artery Disease

BACKGROUND Plasma lipids are risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD) in part because of race-specific associ-ations of lipids with CHD.OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to understand why CHD risk equations underperform in Black adults.METHODS Between 2003 and 2007, the REGARDS (REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke) cohort recruited 30,239 Black and White individuals aged $45 years from the contiguous United States. We used Cox regression models adjusted for clinical and behavioral risk factors to estimate the race-specific hazard of plasma lipid levels with incident CHD (myocardial infarction or CHD death).RESULTS Among 23,901 CHD-free participants (57.8% White and 58.4% women, mean age 64 +/- 9 years) over a median 10 years of follow-up, 664 and 951 CHD events occurred among Black and White adults, respectively. Low -density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides were associated with increased risk of CHD in both races (P interaction by race >0.10). For sex-specific clinical HDL-C categories: low HDL-C was associated with increased CHD risk in White (HR: 1.22; 95% CI: 1.05-1.43) but not in Black (HR: 0.94; 95% CI: 0.78-1.14) adults (P interaction by race = 0.08); high HDL-C was not associated with decreased CHD events in either race (HR: 0.96; 95% CI: 0.79-1.16 for White participants and HR: 0.91; 95% CI: 0.74-1.12 for Black adults).CONCLUSIONS Low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides modestly predicted CHD risk in Black and White adults. Low HDL-C was associated with increased CHD risk in White but not Black adults, and high HDL-C was not protective in either group. Current high-density lipoprotein cholesterol-based risk calculations could lead to inaccurate risk assessment in Black adults. (J Am Coll Cardiol 2022;80:2104-2115) (c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier on behalf of the American College of Cardiology Foundation. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

The purpose of this study was to understand why CHD risk equations underperform in Black adults. The study found that low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides play a role in predicting CHD risk in both Black and White adults, while low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol was associated with increased CHD risk in White adults but not in Black adults.