If you’re concerned about keeping your heart healthy, there are plenty of steps you can take to that effect, from making dietary changes to taking certain medication. But what about factors that can’t be managed in this way? Based on a new set of recommendations from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, there’s a new twist to monitoring your heart’s health: a genetic test that measures another risk factor that diet and behavior have little effect on.
The organizations now recommend that adults be tested for lipoprotein(a), which can increase the risk of heart disease. According to their announcement of the modified guidelines, one test in adulthood should suffice: “lifestyle changes minimally affect Lp(a) levels, so repeat testing is generally not needed.” As NPR’s Allison Aubrey explained, the updated guidelines are part of a larger medical effort to assess people’s lifetime risk of heart disease.
As the head of the committee tasked with writing the new guidelines, Roger S. Blumenthal, MD, explained in a statement, testing earlier can help get people at risk of heart disease access to medication sooner. “While we want to try to optimize healthy lifestyle habits as the first step to lower cholesterol, we realize that if lipid numbers aren’t within the desirable range after a period of lifestyle optimization, we should consider adding lipid-lowering medication earlier than we would have considered 10 years ago,” Dr. Blumenthal explained.
Lipoprotein(a) testing was not the only addition to the revised guidelines from the AHA and ACC. The guidelines also call for at-risk men and women over 40 and 45, respectively, to undergo a noncontrast coronary artery calcium (CAC) scan. In addition, the organizations also recommend using a different method for purposes of risk assessment; taken together, these new guidelines can hopefully lead to more people leading longer and healthier lives.
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Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal.
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