Heart & Stroke Reference Desk

Plain-language explanations of heart and stroke terminology, lab units, and the numbers on your reports

Plain-language explanations of heart and stroke terminology, lab units, and the numbers on your reports

This site is a small reference desk for the words and numbers that come up around heart and stroke health. It exists because most people first meet this vocabulary at a stressful moment — a lab report full of unfamiliar units, a chart with two blood pressure numbers, a news story that uses heart attack and cardiac arrest interchangeably when they are different things.

The pages here explain terminology and measurement, not treatment. You can read what the two blood pressure numbers mean, why US and international cholesterol reports use different units, how heart attack, cardiac arrest, and stroke differ as terms, and what the specifications on a home blood pressure monitor actually mean.

The most practical thing on the site is the cholesterol unit converter, which translates between mg/dL (used on US lab reports) and mmol/L (used in Canada, the UK, and most of the world). If you are comparing a US report against international guidance — or reading Canadian material like the Heart and Stroke Foundation's — the converter saves you the arithmetic.

Everything here draws on established public references such as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, MedlinePlus, and the American Heart Association, and each page links to them. Nothing here is medical advice: what a number means for you is a conversation for you and your clinician.

Cholesterol Unit Converter: mg/dL ⇄ mmol/L

US lab reports state cholesterol in milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). Canada, the UK, and most other countries use millimoles per liter (mmol/L). This converter translates total cholesterol, LDL, or HDL values between the two systems so you can compare a US report against international materials. Note that triglycerides and blood glucose use different conversion factors because they are different molecules — this tool is for cholesterol values only.

This tool performs a unit conversion only. It does not interpret results, classify them, or tell you whether a value is a concern. Questions about what your numbers mean for your health belong to your clinician.