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Women: Lower estrogen equals higher cholesterol
Those female hormones—especially estrogen—do a lot of great things for your heart, including help manage your cholesterol. As hormone levels drop in your 50s, says Dr. Chinnaiyan, “the bad cholesterol starts to increase and the good cholesterol starts to decrease.”
That’s why, if you don’t make some adjustments to your diet and lifestyle, you could eventually experience inflammation in heart arteries that, combined with poor cholesterol, can result in the formation of blockages, she warns.