A Retrospective Sudies about the Total Serum Cholesterol Level and Smoking Status in Atherosclerotic Arterial Occlusive Disease of the Lower Extremities

ABSTRACT

Many investigations about the development and progression of atherosclerosis have reported that hypertension, diabetes mellitus, serum lipids levels and somking status are major risk factors to the atherogenesis of peripheral arteries in Western countries. But the intensities of these epidemiological factors on atherogenesis are not supposed to be equal in oriental population owing to the different pattern of food intake or genetic factors. The aim of this study was to determine how the level of serum lipids and smoking status among the risk factors would be related with the presence of the atherosclerotic occlusive disease of lower extremity. 89 male patients with this disease were included in this study and same numbers of male surgical patients without peripheral arterial occlusive symptoms was used as control group. The levels of serum lipids (total-cholesterol and trglyceride) and smoking status were investigated retrospectively. The results were as follows. 1) serum total-cholesterol levels were higher in disease group than that of the control group (163.3+/-4.63 S.E. vs. 153.3+/-6.10 S.E.), but there was no statistical significance(P>0.05). 2) serum triglyceride levels were significantly higher in disease group than that of control group (148.5+/-11.0 S.E vs. 109.9 +/-.59 S.E., P<0.05 ANOVA). 3) the rate of smoking in disease group was 85.4% (76/89) which was significantly higher than that of the control group, 37.1% (33/89) (P<0.05, Chi-square test). These findings suggested that in our disease population studied, smoking has more strong impact on the development of atherosclerosis of lower extremity than serum total-cholesterol level.