High cholesterol simulated.

What this shows

Risks can be hard to make sense of when they’re just numbers. This simulation makes the risk of high cholesterol tangible by following 1,000 men with high LDL cholesterol (160 mg/dL) from age 30 to 85, showing heart attacks and strokes as they happen. It then re-rolls the dice but with LDL lowered to 90 mg/dL. Lowering cholesterol early prevents many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths.

How it works

This is a Monte Carlo simulation, run year by year: for each subject, each year, we roll dice weighted by likelihood.

Baseline risk. A high-LDL man’s lifetime chance of a heart attack or stroke, about 23% here, is built from the American Heart Association’s PREVENT equations. Of the events that occur, about 22% are fatal, including sudden deaths outside the hospital.

Lowering LDL early and holding it low cuts lifetime risk to about 16%. The reduction figure comes from large statin trials, which find that risk tracks cumulative LDL exposure.

Caveats: This simulation follows a cohort who don’t die of anything else, to isolate the impact of high cholesterol specifically. Real lives carry other risks the model leaves out — someone who would have had a heart attack at 80 might die of cancer at 70. It’s also male-specific; baseline risk for women is lower. Individual risk depends on many factors; this simulation aims to convey the magnitude of risk that high cholesterol poses (and the risk reduction from treating it) in a more intuitive fashion than numbers alone can provide.