Nearly half of over 40s in US would be candidates for statins under new guidance

Implementation of the most recent guidelines on treating high cholesterol from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association would make 48.6% of US adults aged 40 to 75 years candidates for treatment with statins, a new analysis finds.1

That would be 12.8 million more people than under the preceding established recommendations of the Third Adult Treatment Panel (ATP III) of the National Cholesterol Education Program.2 3

The analysis was published online this week by the New England Journal of Medicine. Michael J Pencina of the Duke Clinical Research Institute at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is the paper’s lead author.

Under the older guidelines, statin treatment was recommended for patients with …