A research discovered a connection between heart disease and Xanthelasma. If so, it may help to stop heart attacks. This article will provide you with more information about this research and its outcomes.
Many people can understand each other just by looking at each other. But the look is not the only one that tells everything. The eyes can also give us signs regarding your health, signs like the appearance of small yellow bumps or plaques on the eyelids which may be trying to indicate that you have heart problems and need help to prevent them.
Put simply, yellow plaques are known as Xanthelasma, in short, cholesterol cells that huddle into the skin. Xanthomas or xanthelasma can develop anywhere in the human body, but the most common locations are the elbows, joints, tendons, knees, hands, feet or buttocks. They can be in many different sizes up to 3 inches or 8.5 cm in diameter. So when these yellowish plaques appear on the eyelids th a are referred to as Xanthelasma palpebrarum.
Furthermore there is another type of collection of lipids or cholesterol fats in the eyes called corneal arcus, which is a yellowish ring at the edge of the eyes. As both Xanthelasma and corneal arcus indicate cholesterol deposits, they already have been studied by different research teams before, but no direct link was established between Xanthelasma and heart disease.
In a further research of the link between Xanthelasma and heart disease, some specialists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark carried out a research that demonstrated that Xanthelasma are related to an increased risk of heart disease and relative early death. However they did not find any causative direct link between Xanthelasma and heart disease.
In the latest research of the British Medical Journal, the researchers surveyed 13,000 to 14,000 people between the ages of 20 and 90. At the start of the research none had heart problems, gradually more than four percent had Xanthelasma and nearly a quarter had corneal arcus as well. Throughout the study, more than 1800 patients suffered from a heart attack, almost 4,000 developed heart disease, near about 1500 suffered a stroke, and more than 1,800 developed a cerebrovascular disease.
At the end of the study, researchers found that having Xanthelasma is correlated with a higher chance of having a heart attack and developing heart disease. However the direct causative link has not been clearly identified. It maybe likely that the increased chance of heart attacks was due to the higher cholesterol levels alone.