Abnormally low "good" cholesterol, studied across sex and life stage in over 50,000 Korean adults — the study’s real finding was that menopause, not age, is what turns up the genetic risk.
Hypo-HDL-cholesterolemia is abnormally low HDL ("good") cholesterol, one of several metabolic disorders studied together in the research behind this page.
A 2022 study using the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study (KoGES) cohort ran genome-wide association analyses in 50,808 Korean adults — the first study of its kind to analyze genetic risk factors for metabolic disorders separately by both sex and life stage (young adult, peri-menopausal, and older adult groups), rather than treating age as a single continuous variable. It examined eight metabolic phenotypes together: general obesity, abdominal obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, hypertriglyceridemia, hypo-HDL-cholesterolemia, and metabolic syndrome.
Across all eight phenotypes, the study found 101 significant loci, 15 of them newly reported. Six of the loci tied to hypo-HDL-cholesterolemia specifically are catalogued here: rs17410996 (near LPL), rs75326924 (CD36), rs6467314 (near KLF14), rs4821130 (near YDJC), rs10422861 (PEPD), and rs2494746 (AKT1). The abstract does not break the 101-locus or 15-newly-reported totals down by which of the eight phenotypes each belongs to, so this page makes no such claim for these six specifically.
The study's central conclusion was that menopausal transition, rather than aging itself, potentiates the influence of genetic risk on metabolic disorders — some genetic loci showed associations specific to peri-menopausal women that did not appear in younger women or in men of the same age. Several low-frequency genetic variants were found to play a role in metabolic disturbances only within a specific sex-and-age group, rather than across the population generally.
Hypo-HDL-cholesterolemia is diagnosed by a blood lipid panel, not by genotype. These six variants are research associations from a Korean population study, not a diagnostic test, and this study’s Korean cohort may not generalize directly to other populations.
The study's sex-and-life-stage framing is itself a clinical finding worth knowing: it suggests that for at least some metabolic disorders, when in a person's life genetic risk actually shows up may depend on menopausal status rather than calendar age alone — though this remains a population-level research finding, not something used to guide individual screening or treatment today.
What a 23andMe/AncestryDNA export or raw VCF can and can't tell you about Hypo-HDL-Cholesterolemia comes down to these specific, well-studied positions — not a diagnosis.
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Hypo-HDL-Cholesterolemia. MyGeneLog™. https://www.mygenelog.com/conditions/hypo-hdl-cholesterolemia
Hypo-HDL-cholesterolemia is abnormally low HDL ("good") cholesterol, one of eight metabolic phenotypes studied together in the Korean research behind this page.
According to this study, yes — its central finding was that menopausal transition, not aging itself, potentiates how much genetic risk factors influence metabolic disorders in women.
Yes. The study behind this page used the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study (KoGES) cohort, 50,808 Korean adults — findings from one population do not always transfer to others.
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