Different measures may be required to accurately identify MI risk in this age group
THURSDAY, March 9, 2017 (HealthDay News) — Cholesterol’s impact on myocardial infarction (MI) may differ by age, according to research being presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, to be held from March 17 to 19 in Washington, D.C.
Bradley Collins, a fourth-year student at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues tracked the medical records of 813 relatively young people — men younger than 45 and women younger than 50. All had been treated for MI at two large medical centers over the past 16 years.
The researchers found that these younger patients who’d had an MI were more likely to have low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol than high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Low HDL cholesterol was seen in about 90 percent of the men and 75 percent of the women.
The findings suggest that different measures may be required to accurately identify MI risk in this age group, Collins said in a news release from the American College of Cardiology, and traditional tools for calculating MI risk may underestimate risk in these patients by putting too much emphasis on a patient’s age. “Ultimately, we would like to develop new tools for calculating heart attack risk that are more applicable to younger people,” he added.
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