Cardiovascular Disease

While no preventive measure can eliminate the chances of developing heart disease, the U.S. government has issued guidelines in an effort to aggressively treat and prevent heart disease in millions of Americans. In addition to more emphasis on low-fat diets and exercise, the guidelines call an estimated 36 million to take cholesterol-lowering drugs.

The guidelines include:

• Treating patients with at least a 20% risk of having a heart attack in 10 years as aggressively as those who already have heart disease.
• Treating high cholesterol more aggressively in people with diabetes.
• Using a lipoprotein profile as the first test for high cholesterol.
• Modifying the current HDL ("good") cholesterol level guideline to 40 mg/dL.
• Emphasizing the need for nutrition, exercise, and weight control in treating high cholesterol.
• Identifying people with "metabolic syndrome" and treating them aggressively to prevent heart attacks (a condition characterized by abdominal obesity, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, high blood-sugar levels, and low HDL ("good") cholesterol)
• Treating people with high triglyceride levels more aggressively.
• Advising to take cholesterol-lowering drugs to lower cholesterol instead of hormone replacement therapy (the American Heart Association recently endorsed this recommendation too).