A commonly used method of calculating a person’s risk of heart attack or stroke in the next five years may overestimate the actual risk, leading doctors to unnecessarily prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs, researchers said Monday.
The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
“From a relative standpoint, the overestimation is approximately five- to six-fold,” said senior author Alan Go, MD, chief of cardiovascular and metabolic conditions research at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research.
