Engaging both patients and physicians in the use of cholesterol lowering medicines is needed, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Among people who’ve had a heart attack, stroke, or other cardiovascular event and need a cholesterol lowering medicine, about 2/3 will take one. Among those who have not had such an event but do have high cholesterol only about a quarter take these medicines,  leaving many at risk. Caleb Alexander, a drug safety and efficacy expert at Johns Hopkins and one of the study’s authors, says both patients and their physicians need to be engaged in this process.

Alexander: It's a shared responsibility. Patients are in some sense the captain of their own ships but they require clinician input. Of course there are different models for decision making and for how information is managed in clinical settings, but yes I would say most commonly and most fundamentally this is a shared process and that clinicians and patients both have to be a part of it. There are settings where patients stand an enormous amount of gain from taking these treatments and yet they're not taking them.         :30

Alexander encourages everyone to know about their cardiovascular risk and to take steps to reduce it, as it remains the number one cause of death in the US. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.