New guidelines and calculator debate rages

Patients in good cardiovascular health would be advised against blindly adhering to the new cholesterol guidelines, writes vascular surgeon Mr Sherif Sultan from the recent VEITH symposium in New York. In a major embarrassment to the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA)’s new guidelines, the online calculator appears to seriously overestimate risk, so much so that it could fallaciously advise that millions more people are candidates for statin drugs, a debate on the guidelines and calculator at the 40th VEITH Annual Symposium on Vascular and Endovascular Issues 2013, held recently in New York, concluded. The…