Serum triglyceride and risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, and total mortality in Japanese-American men.

The role of serum triglyceride as a risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, and total mortality was examined in men of Japanese ancestry who were 45 to 78 years old. During the first 10 years following a baseline nonfasting triglyceride determination, there were 490 incidence cases of CHD in 7615 men at risk. Average annual incidence rates were 2.1 times higher in men with nonfasting values above the 75th percentile (279 mg/dl) than in those under the 25th percentile (129 mg/dl, p less than 0.001). This association largely disappeared when associations of triglyceride with other CHD risk factors were accounted for. Fasting triglycerides were measured in a representative sample of 1729 men part-way through the study. With an average follow-up of 5.7 years there were 72 new CHD cases in this group with the risk for men in the top quartile (above 195 mg/dl) being 1.9 times higher than for those in the bottom quartile (below 94 mg/dl). This gradient was of borderline significance (p less than 0.10) and completely disappeared in a multivariate analysis which included HDL and other factors. It appears that the association of triglyceride with CHD in this cohort is of a noncausal nature. Triglycerides were not predictive of stroke or of total mortality in these men.