Lp(a)Lipoprotein(a)
A largely genetic, independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
Lipoprotein(a), written Lp(a), is an LDL-like particle with an additional protein, apolipoprotein(a), attached to it. That extra protein makes it both atherogenic, like LDL, and prothrombotic, so it contributes to plaque and to clotting.
Its defining feature is that your level is roughly 80 to 90% genetically determined and essentially stable through life. Diet, exercise and weight loss barely move it, which makes it unlike every other lipid marker on a standard panel.
That stability is precisely why it is worth measuring once. A single test in adulthood tells you about a lifelong risk that standard cholesterol testing misses entirely, and guidelines increasingly recommend exactly that. Levels at or above about 125 nmol/L, roughly 50 mg/dL, are generally treated as high risk.
It explains a category of patient that otherwise makes no sense: the person with an unremarkable lipid panel, a healthy lifestyle and premature heart disease in the family. Raised Lp(a) is common, affecting something like one in five people, and mostly undiagnosed.
Knowing it is high does not leave you helpless, even though the number itself is hard to change. It raises the importance of everything else that is modifiable, particularly LDL and ApoB, blood pressure, smoking and diabetes control, and it changes how aggressively those are managed.
Targeted drugs are in late stage clinical trials, which is another argument for knowing your number now rather than later.
In practice, ask for Lp(a) once, do not repeat it annually, and if it is raised treat it as a reason to be thorough about every other risk factor. Our heart age calculator accounts for it alongside the rest.
Sources
Where your own result would sit
Most people reading this page are holding a blood-test report with this marker on it, and the question they arrived with is whether their number is normal. A reference interval says where most results from a healthy population fall; a guideline threshold is where a clinical body draws a line for a decision. Neither is a target, and a result on the wrong side of one is not a diagnosis: the same number can be unremarkable in one person and worth looking into in another, which is why the clinician who ordered the test reads it against your history rather than against a list.
Lp(a) has no published interval on this page yet. We hold one, and the dashboard draws it beside a reader’s own result, but it has not been read back against the laboratory’s own page since it was collected. A figure printed beside somebody’s blood result has to have been seen at its source, not remembered, so this one waits.
On your own blood test?
Lp(a) is one of the markers FitTools can read from an uploaded blood-test report. You confirm every value before anything is saved, and your results are explained together in one place.