By Michael Mansour, MD, FACC, chair of ACC’s Board of Governors

Last November, the ACC and the American Heart Association (AHA), in collaboration with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and other specialty societies, released four prevention guidelines that focused on obesity, the assessment of cardiovascular risk, lifestyle modifications to reduce cardiovascular risk and management of elevated blood cholesterol and body weight in adults.

Last week, the guidelines were published in the print edition of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and the cholesterol guidelines included a few notable updates to its tables and figures in order to help readers more easily interpret the guidelines. These changes include:

• Table 2 outlines the latest changes to the guidelines so that updates may be easily reviewed

• Table 3 now summarizes key recommendations from readers in regards to the treatment of blood cholesterol to reduce ASCVD risk in adults. These include follow-up care recommendations and lifestyle changes, appropriate intensity of statin therapy, and need for regular follow-up of lipids to determine statin response and adherence to lifestyle and drug therapy

• Figure 2 has been updated and merged with a portion of Figure 4 to show the workflow of the guidelines and correct the inaccurate impression that all individuals with a 7.5 percent or more ASCVD risk should receive a statin under the guidelines

Finally, I encourage you all to read this letter to the editor by Neil Stone, MD, FACC, et. al., who aim to clarify some of the inaccurate perspectives of the ASCVD risk estimator tool as well as the cholesterol guidelines. They explain, “the risk assessment guideline full document provides far more extensive internal and external evaluation of the pooled cohort equations (and assessment of potential overestimation of risks) than has ever been provided for any other risk equations at the time of their publication."

For more information and resources on the prevention guidelines, visit CardioSource.org/Prevention. 

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