New guidelines could mean nearly 56 million Americans would be eligible for statins

New heart health guidelines could mean 56 million Americans would be eligible for cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. 

The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine's online edition, mean that 12.8 million more Americans ages 40-75 worried about heart disease would be taking statins.

Patients with a 7.5 percent or greater chance of having heart disease within 10 years would be considered eligible for treatment with a statin.

The new recommendations are controversial among U.S. cardiologists because it means a new approach to assessing a person's risk for heart disease. Normally, doctors work to lower a patient's "bad" LDL cholesterol levels, but now they are being asked to welcome a new online calculator that factors in characteristics such as smoking and obesity. Critics say the calculator-based technique overestimates the number of people needing treatment.

"It shows there is a huge expansion of the number of people for whom statins are recommended," Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic who in November argued for a delay in implementing the guidelines, told Reuters in a phone interview.

Lead researcher Michael Pencina's and his team used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) to determine how many more people would be affected by the altered heart disease assessment.

The analysis showed that the new guidelines could result in 49 percent of adults ages 40-75 being recommended for statin therapy - a 38 percent increase from the previous guidelines.

In terms of the gender-specific impact, previously 30 percent of men ages 60 to 75 were recommended for statin use, but that number jumps to 87.4 percent under the new guidelines. As for women over 60, the number leaps from 21.2 percent to 53.6 percent under the new guidelines.

Dr Neil Stone, who chaired the committee that issued the new guidelines, stresses the distinction that the revised guidelines are used to calculate who potentially needs treatment.

"The risk estimator doesn't determine the statin prescription. It determines the need for a risk discussion," he said.