New cholesterol management guidelines call for personalized risk assessments

Leading heart experts released cholesterol management guidelines Saturday that call on doctors to tailor treatment to more personalized risk assessments of each patient and recommend the use of two new kinds of drugs for those at the greatest danger of disease.

The recommendations build on and address criticism of guidelines issued in 2013 that fundamentally altered the way health-care providers determine a patient’s risk of heart attack and cardiovascular disease. In that watershed document, the experts told doctors to stop trying to lower patients’ cholesterol numbers to specific targets and instead follow an overall matrix that attempts to predict their future risk of problems.