FATTY ACID COMPOSITION OF ADIPOSE TISSUE IN RELATION TO DIET AND CORONARY HEART DISEASE

Abstract

Dietary factors are at least in part responsible for the high mortality on coronary heart disease in Europe and the United States. The fatty acid composition of adipose tissue, reflecting mainly the intake of dietary fat, may be of value in assessing the risk for coronary heart disease.
In a comparative study of the Japanese and the American, two populations with an extremely different incidence of coronary heart disease, the American had significantly more lauric, myristic, palmitic, stearic and oleic and less palmitoleic and linoleic acids.
In an autopsy study on the American, the degree of pathologically graded coronary arteriosclerosis correlated positively with age and relative body weight, and negatively with lauric and stearic acids.
In a diet-controlled clinical study in two groups of the German, one with and one without coronary heart disease, only stearic acid in adipose tissue showed a significant difference between both groups, its proportion being lower in patients with coronary heart disease. Although stearic acid, to-gether with age, discriminated significantly between the two groups studied, the proportion of stearic acid in a single subject does not predict with rea-sonable certainty the presence or absence of coronary heart disease.
The role of stearic acid in atherogenesis has to await further clarifica-tion.