Several members of the Belgian Societies of Atherosclerosis and Cardiology have revisited in the form of 10 questions the main points of the new recommendations of the European Atherosclerosis Society (EAS) and European Society of Cardiology (ESC) concerning dyslipidemia management for preventing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (AVD). These new guidelines are underpinned by a number of key concepts, including the certainty that LDL cholesterol is the major cause underlying the development of atherosclerosis, that reducing LDL cholesterol helps diminish cardiovascular risk, that this cardiovascular benefit is the same regardless of how this reduction is met (nutrition, statin, ezetimibe, or PCSK9 inhibitor), and that there is neither a lower limit to this effect nor any danger at all of extremely low LDL cholesterol levels. To effectively put this knowledge into practice, a step-by-step approach is recommended; thereby enabling us to weight the intensity of the preventive approach based on individuals’ overall MCVA risk and their baseline (untreated) LDL-C levels.
Key Words
Cardiovascular prevention, risk factor, cholesterol, diabetes, statin