US heart doctors urge wider use of anti-cholesterol drug to reduce risks
Rather than using anti-cholesterol drugs for those in greatest danger, they should be taken widely to lower heart attack risk, US medics say
Dramatically escalating the fight against heart attacks and strokes, cardiologists in the United States have rewritten the guidebook on how people should be treated with statins and unveiled a plan that could double the number of patients taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs.
The new approach, presented on Tuesday by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (AHA), represents a stark shift from the way doctors have prescribed the popular drugs for most of the last decade. The guidelines are likely to be followed across the US and influence treatment worldwide.
This is a dramatic change from the 2002 cholesterol guideline
Doctors who have focused on reducing the "bad" LDL cholesterol of patients who are at greatest risk of a heart attack will now be urged to refocus their efforts on using statin therapy on a wider range of at-risk patients, many of them still relatively healthy, to drive down their odds of a heart attack or stroke.
The guidelines dropped an emphasis on targets for lowering LDL levels and suggest that individual patient risk of developing heart disease rather than an LDL number should be used to decide the need for statins.
There had been an expectation that the new guidelines would set a new, lower LDL target for heart patients.
"This guideline represents a departure from previous guidelines because it doesn't focus on specific target levels of (LDL) or bad cholesterol, although the definition of optimal LDL cholesterol has not changed," Dr Neil Stone, lead author of the cholesterol report, said. The AHA said: "This is a dramatic change from the 2002 federal cholesterol guideline."