2013
The long-standing strategy of reducing heart-attack risk by lowering cholesterol to specific targets is being jettisoned under new clinical guidelines unveiled Tuesday that mark the biggest shift in cardiovascular-disease prevention in nearly three decades.
Gone is the familiar and easy-to-understand guidance to keep LDL, or bad cholesterol, below 100 or below 70 for people at high risk—a mainstay of current prevention policy. Instead, doctors are being told to assess a patient’s risk more broadly and prescribe cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to those falling within one of four risk categories.
The aim is to more effectively direct statin treatment to patients with the most to gain, and move away from relatively arbitrary treatment targets that are less reliable in predicting risk than is widely believed.
“We’re trying to focus the most appropriate therapy to prevent heart attack and stroke…in a wide range of patients,” said Neil J. Stone, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and head of the panel that wrote the cholesterol guidelines.
Cardiovascular disease is the Western world’s leading killer. In the U.S., heart disease accounts for about 600,000 deaths each year, or about one in four deaths. About 130,000 people in the U.S. die each year of stroke, which is also a major cause of disability.
via Panel Unveils Shakeup in Strategy to Cut Heart Risk – WSJ.com.
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