The first strategy to improve blood cholesterol levels in lifestyle management, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you’ve been told you have high LDL cholesterol in your blood, the first place to begin to try to improve it is with diet and exercise. That’s according to new guidelines from the American College of Cardiology, and such intervention should begin much earlier than you might imagine. Roger Blumenthal, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins and head of the committee that wrote the new guidelines, explains.

Blumenthal: It's important to start behavioral counseling in youth. If indeed a young person especially after the age of 30 has persistently really high LDL's of greater than 160 or a strong family history of heart disease or a high estimated long term risk that they should certainly consider or starting on a medicine sooner rather than later, and just like the blood pressure guidelines which said that if you're above 130 / 80 after six months of lifestyle improvements, if you can't get below that you should seriously consider going on the medicine.    :32

Blumenthal says statins are first line treatment. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.