Global Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol—Leveraging Estimation for Action

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2023 study represents another step in the laudable, collective effort to better understand the causes of health, disease, and mortality around the world in a comprehensive and cohesive manner. The article in this issue of JAMA by the GBD 2023 LDL Cholesterol Collaborators1 reports trends in the global, regional, and national burden of cardiovascular disease (CVD) attributed to elevated low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) from 1990 to 2023. The study addresses an important and arguably underrecognized problem in many parts of the world. The methods are consistent with other GBD reports and represent the best current global estimates of elevated LDL-C. Other reports using pooled demographic health survey and related data have been published.2,3 This report extends the previous observations by linking findings to the global burden of CVD, namely ischemic heart disease and ischemic stroke, and by using the most contemporary data. Further refinement of these estimates is expected through future iterations of GBD and other large-scale pooling research.