The Wall Street Journal reports that doctors are developing guidelines for administering statins based on an elevated cardiac risk profile. This new approach, which considers risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and family health history, in addition to the commonly-used lipid levels, would ultimately provide a more patient-specific treatment regimen:
ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross remembers when “we would only look at total cholesterol to assess who to medicate. Then when HDL and LDL ratios were available, we added those parameters to the treatment decision. More recently, research has implicated the importance of C reactive protein. Now doctors are considering a global cardiac risk that bridges all of it.”
ACSH's Jeff Stier agrees that the medicine “is moving in the right direction as our knowledge base expands.”
