I took one look at the abstract and I completely understood it. No. Seriously does someone understand the abstract and is able to summarize it in readable English?
The abstract seems pretty clear to me. In essence low cholesterol is associated with even greater risk than high cholesterol. The optimum is somewhere around 200 mg/dL. The study was performed over a large group of Koreans over more than ten years.
The trick to read scientific papers is that unless you're in that specific field, skimming doesn't work. You have to read sentence by sentence and sometimes stop and look up terms you don't understand for the whole to make sense.
>The abstract seems pretty clear to me. In essence low cholesterol is associated with even greater risk than high cholesterol. The optimum is somewhere around 200 mg/dL. The study was performed over a large group of Koreans over more than ten years.
This sentence is an EVEN easier read and is more suitable candidate for an abstract.
That's it. Though I did total opposite of detailed reading. I rounded all numbers to have them in ranges, trying to skim over details (but read slowly nevertheless). Once you understand what U-shape curve is and that it is probably key to the whole thing, you can unpack the abstract. You just need to know what U curve is.
My very crude understanding would be (if I read the abstract right): Too low total cholesterol is bad, too high is bad (that U shaped relationship between total cholesterol and mortality, also holds for age-sex groups). With the link between high and bad weaker than between low and good.
The abstract is a summary of the figures (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38461-y#Fig2) in words. It can be a bit hard to parse, but you can't use graphics in a paper abstract. So imagine yourself trying to convey the information in Figures 2, 3 in words only (say over a phone conversation, or a plain text message)
It’s very confusing to keep track of all the lists of things presented ‘respectively’, yes!
Interesting though, seems that from a total cholesterol level of 200 to 229 mg/dL (or a bit lower optimal range for the youngest age groups), raising the level causes increased mortality, but below that level, raising it decreases mortality even more than raising from a high level increased it, so it seems like ‘cholesterol == bad’ is wrong, having really low levels (it seems) can be much worse than having high levels.
The second bit seems to say that increases from the high range were worse (increased mortality rates more) for younger people and but the effect decreased pretty linearly as you go up through the age groups, but the positive effect of increasing from a low level was pretty consistent for each age group, except for the youngest and oldest group.
It just describes the figures. U shaped curves means too little or too much cholesterol was associated with mortality. Whereas the previous assumption for cholesterol levels was “The lower, the better."
