There’s a test your adolescent should have to help avoid cardiovascular disease, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Your preadolescent child should have their blood drawn to test their cholesterol levels, new guidelines from the American College of Cardiology specify. That’s because of a condition that happens in one in 250 people where such levels are abnormally high called familial hypercholesterolemia. One author of the guidelines, cardiologist Seth Martin at Johns Hopkins, says early treatment, in childhood, is key.

Martin: To some extent it can be detected because you have a parent who's already known to have a lipid disorder and then you proactively test in children but we want to make sure that we're not fully relying on that, so we do have a recommendation that in children 9 to 11 years of age who haven't had prior lipid testing that they undergo lipid profile with the purpose of identifying familial hypercholesterolemia.    :24

Martin notes that statins are effective for children in lowering cholesterol levels and have been shown to be safe. He says early detection can prevent the development of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular conditions like heart attacks later in life. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.