As many of you are aware the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) came out with new guidelines on cardiovascular disease prevention a few days ago. As part of this, they produce a risk calculator. Using this calculator, if your risk of heart attack or stroke is greater and 7.5% over the next 10 years, you should take a statin – for the rest of your life.

I downloaded this calculator, and I have been playing around with it. I think I would tend to agree with the headline in the NY times 18^th November 2013:

Risk Calculator for Cholesterol Appears Flawed

To be frank you can fiddle around with the figures on this calculator for hours. I think my OCD is getting worse. (Maybe I should take a statin to cure my OCD). One of the questions I wanted to find an answer to was the following, at what age would a perfectly healthy man (with ‘optimal’ risk factors) have to take a statin for the rest of his life.

So, I fed in the figures, and use the ‘optimal’ figures for cholesterol and blood pressure on the risk calculator

So, there you are. You can do absolutely everything ‘right’ be as healthy as healthy can be – according to the AHA and ACC. Yet, by the age of sixty three you need to take a statin – for the rest of your life.

The next question I wanted to find the answer to was, at what age does a ‘normal’, very healthy man have to start using a statin? In the UK, the average total cholesterol for men is 5.0mmol/l. [this is 193mg/dl in the US]. The average blood pressure in the UK systolic is 129mmHg.  (To be frank, I think the average cholesterol level for men is higher than this, but the WHO says not).

Feed these figures in, and you would need to start taking a statin, for the rest of your life, by the age of fifty eight. Which means that very healthy men, with no real risk factors for cardiovascular disease – at all – have to start statins at fifty eight.

What of women. Well, they get another seven years of statin free life. A super healthy woman, with optimal risk factors, reaches the dreaded 7.5% risk aged 70. An ‘average’ healthy women, with average BP and cholesterol levels, would have to start a statin aged sixty three.

In summary, using this risk calculator, extremely healthy men will be starting statins at fifty eight, and very healthy women at sixty three. This, then, marks the age at which life becomes a statin deficient state. You can be as healthy as healthy can be. You can do everything right, have no risk factors at all for cardiovascular disease, and yet you still need to take medication to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Sorry, what was the question again?

European cardiovascular disease statistics can be found here.