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The American Health Association and the American College of Cardiology have defended their new prevention guidelines after critics charged that a risk assessment tool included in the document might put millions of Americans on cholesterol lowering drugs unnecessarily.
"We stand behind our guidelines [and] the process that was used to create them," said Mariell Jessup, president of the American Heart Association, in a statement issued in response to the criticism, which has been reported widely in the US media.
At issue is a risk calculator designed to help guide the decision whether a patient should be prescribed a statin, by estimating the patient's 10 year risk of having a heart attack or stroke. 1 2
The guidance recommends the initiation of statin treatment for the primary prevention of atherosclerotic cardiovascular events if the calculator's algorithm indicated that a patient had a 10 year risk of more than 7.5% and recommends consideration of statin treatment if the 10 year risk...