The scoring system recommended in national guidelines for assessing patients’ cardiovascular risk may overestimate the number of people in England who need treatment for lipid disorders and may be missing others, a new analysis indicates.

Lipid modification guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which were published in May 2008, advise doctors to use a modified version of the Framingham algorithm to check patients’ 10 year cardiovascular risk and decide whether they need drug treatment to reduce raised cholesterol concentrations.

But a new analysis by epidemiologists at the University of Oxford and commissioned by the Department of Health says that the choice of risk scoring system was based on “incorrect and severely misleading” findings (www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_103341). The analysis, some of the results of …