If you have high 'bad' cholesterol, lowering it more aggressively can help you live longer, especially if your levels are really high to begin with. Doctors should decide how hard to treat based on...

If your 'bad' cholesterol is 100 or higher, lowering it more aggressively helps prevent heart-related deaths. But if it's already below 100, lowering it even more doesn't seem to help much — there might be a cutoff where treatment stops adding extra benefit.

Taking stronger treatments to lower bad cholesterol seems to cut the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other serious heart problems — even if your cholesterol isn’t that high to begin with.

When people lower their 'bad' cholesterol to very low levels using strong medications, they have fewer heart attacks and strokes than those with higher cholesterol levels.

Lowering bad cholesterol really aggressively might not help people live longer because while it prevents heart attacks, it could also cause other problems that balance things out.

Lowering bad cholesterol really aggressively helps prevent heart attacks and strokes in people who already have heart disease, but it doesn’t actually help them live longer — which scientists call the 'cholesterol mortality paradox'.