India, July 30 -- The finding of the 2023 Global Burden of Diseases study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), that India and China alone accounted for just over a third of the global cholesterol-related disease burden is only the latest in a series of foghorn warnings about India's cholesterol crisis. While sailors rarely ignore foghorns, we Indians haven't even stirred. From an adult prevalence of 79% in 2014, lipid abnormalities (including high "bad" cholesterol levels) have shot past 87%, according to the ICMR-INDIAB studies. Particularly worrying is that dyslipidaemia - the balance of fats in the blood getting skewed towards harm - has been found to often remain hidden behind atypical presentations of...