The American Heart Association (AHA) has issued its new guidelines to make the strategies for prevention of heart attacks and strokes more effective. Health experts consider it a drastic change from the traditional strategies.
The proposed strategy, developed by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, intends for doctors to prescribe the treatment of statin drugs to help patients benefit to a greater extent and to avoid the traditional method of targeting specific cholesterol levels to below 70-100 LDL, the bad cholesterol.
The current guidelines were unchanged since 1985 when the National Cholesterol Education Program was founded. It has been the leading strategy since the 1990s when studies have proved the potency of statins in decreasing the levels of bad cholesterol and in preventing heart attacks that could lead to deaths. Soon, the popular belief is that the lower the bad cholesterol, the better.
"We're trying to focus the most appropriate therapy to prevent heart attack and stroke...in a wide range of patients," said Medicine Professor Neil J. Stone who is the head of the committee who devised the guidelines in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
The health experts are pushing for the change because the numerical targets for the bad cholesterol did not go through rigid clinical tests. Further, the previous evidence when closely examined may cause overtreatment of some cardiovascular patients and undertreatment in others.
Thus, they propose that physicians take careful and extensive consideration in evaluating the patients' risk for strokes and heart attacks and prescribe the statin drugs if they can be categorized into the four types of profiles.
There have been a lot of criticisms of how effective the changes will be. However, both advocates and detractors understand that these new guidelines will cause confusion for both the doctors and physicians.
According to Cardiovascular Medicine Chairman Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic, LDL specific numerical targets "give doctors and patients something to shoot for. The elimination of target levels is going to be a huge change for physicians and patients."
"There will be a lot of controversy. You can't go anywhere new without creating a lot of questions. The hope is that we can answer those questions in a way that provides better patient care," explained Dr Stone.
