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Good Cholesterol Causes Glaucoma? Don’t Bet Your Heart Health On It
No, HDL is not a villain for your eyes. Your 8-item credibility checklist for the next such news.
Published in
16 min readFeb 9, 2025
What is new?
A recent study suggests that “good” cholesterol is bad for eyesight and bad cholesterol protects it. The media feeds on it, predictably, but not on an earlier discovery of how these types of studies can be fatally flawed.
Why it matters
Trading one established risk of heart disease for a hallucinated risk of glaucoma can do a lot of harm. With people’s trust in medical news and studies eroding, it is important to help lay readers spot the wheat from the chaff.
Your takeaways
A real-world illustration of flawed health messages, and an 8-item checklist of how to not fall for them from now on.
An About-Face for cholesterol?
Good cholesterol is “a villain for your eyes”, and its bad cousin helps you fend it off. That’s what the latest news suggests.
