She thought she was too young, healthy for high cholesterol. She was wrong.

In her 20s, Alejandra Lavalley worked out two hours a day. She cooked nutritious meals at home and maintained a healthy weight. She was young and active, and yet blood tests kept telling her the same thing: high cholesterol.

"I was at my lowest adult weight, and my cholesterol was somewhere in the three hundreds," she said. A healthy total cholesterol is below 200.

Even statins, the drugs of choice for treating high cholesterol, weren't helping her numbers budge more than about 10 points.

"That's when we decided, as a family, we've got to talk to a cardiologist. This isn't normal," she said, recalling her cardiologist was the "first person to look at (her situation) and say, 'You're right. This isn't supposed to be happening to you.'"

But getting an answer about why her cholesterol was so high despite her efforts was complicated. She was adopted, so she didn't know her biological family's medical history.