STAT June 10, 2024
It’s a familiar scene for patients during a routine primary care visit. The doctor scans blood test results, notes high cholesterol flagged by a standard calculator to assess risk of heart attack or stroke, then decides — and ideally discusses — whether to recommend taking a statin to cut the risk over time.
That conversation may happen less often if changes in the risk model presented by the American Heart Association in November translate into new guidelines for prescribing statins. Those guidelines haven’t been recalibrated yet, but a new analysis suggests that the new risk model could mean far fewer Americans — as many as 40% less than current calculators say — would be candidates for cholesterol-lowering drugs to prevent...
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