New heart guidelines may put 12.8 million more Americans on statins

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New heart guidelines may put 12.8 million more Americans on statins

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - New guidelines on heart health that sparked fierce debate among U.S. cardiologists last fall could lead 12.8 million more Americans to take cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The new estimate would mean 56 million people, or nearly half of the U.S. population between the ages of 40 to 75, could be eligible for taking a statin to prevent heart disease. The findings were published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine's online edition. Most of those would be people over age 60, according to the new analysis, which is the first to quantify the impact of the guidelines issued in November by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology.

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