Cholesterol under-treated in high-risk women in managed ...( DALLAS Feb. 1 Nearly two-thirds of wo...),Health

"Cholesterol management in high-risk women has been proven to save lives and reduce risk of heart attacks. We wanted to determine what opportunities exist to apply the 2004 American Heart Association guidelines for cardiovascular disease prevention in women, especially in a managed care environment," says lead author Lori Mosca, M.D., Ph.D., director of preventive cardiology, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and associate professor of medicine at Columbia University in New York City.

Mosca and colleagues studied a 1.1 million-member managed care database and identified 8,353 women who had established cardiovascular disease at the start of the study or were otherwise at high risk because of diabetes or multiple cardiac risk factors and had not recently been on cholesterol-lowering therapy.

Laboratory and pharmacy information for these women was followed for three years to determine how doctors managed their cholesterol levels. The researchers determined how many women achieved optimal cholesterol levels based on the 2004 American Heart Association prevention guidelines for women.

The guidelines recommend LDL or "bad" cholesterol be less than 100 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL), HDL or "good" cholesterol be more than 50 mg/dL, triglycerides be less than 150 mg/dL, or non-HDL (a combination of all bad forms of cholesterol) be less than 130 mg/dL.

"We found only 7 percent of these high-risk women had optimal levels of all cholesterol measurements at the start of the study. This improved to 12 percent after three years, still far short of where we would like to see these high-risk women," Mosca said. "We also found that only about one-th
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Contact: Carole Bullock
carole.bullock@heart.org
214-706-1279
American Heart Association
1-Feb-2005