For generations, medicine has measured the quantity of protective cholesterol in the blood and called it a proxy for health — yet a quieter story has been unfolding inside those very particles. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that HDL's true protective work may lie not in how much of it circulates, but in the anti-inflammatory molecules it carries, molecules now found to be depleted in people experiencing early cognitive decline. The discovery is most pronounced in men and Hispanic adults, groups already navigating elevated dement