Research
Hormonal
Higher BMI causally increases the risk of Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) independently of LDL cholesterol levels.
High body weight is a direct cause of heart disease risk, but not through the traditional LDL cholesterol pathway. This means that standard lipid-lowering strategies might not fully address the risk in obese individuals unless metabolic health (sugar and triglycerides) is also improved.
GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
We show that higher BMI causes greater CHD risk... our results suggest that BMI is not causally related to LDL-C
Why this rating
Large sample size and robust MR methodology.
Source
The role of glycaemic and lipid risk factors in mediating the effect of BMI on coronary heart disease: A two-step, two-sample Mendelian randomization study
Lin Xu et al. · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2017
DOI 10.1101/118133
preprint
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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