A new expert panel report1 released by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics2 recommends universal screening of 9- to 11-year-old children with a nonfasting lipid panel and targeted screening of 2- to 8-year-old and 12- to 16-year-old children with 2 fasting lipid profiles. These guidelines were developed in parallel with adult guidelines due out later this year, using what are described as “state-of-the art principles of evidence-based medicine.”3 The process is designed with the laudable intentions of improving transparency, keeping recommendations closely tied to the evidence, and indicating where evidence is strong and where guidelines are based on expert opinion. However, we believe that the high evidence grades for the extremely aggressive pediatric lipid recommendations are inaccurate and unjustified and that the conflicts of interest reported by panel members are too substantial to ignore. In short, these...
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August 2012
Commentary|
August 01 2012
Overly Aggressive New Guidelines for Lipid Screening in Children: Evidence of a Broken Process
Thomas B. Newman, MD, MPH;
Departments of aEpidemiology and Biostatistics,
bPediatrics, and
Address correspondence to Thomas B. Newman, MD, MPH, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, UCSF Box 0560, San Francisco, CA 94143. E-mail: [email protected]
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Mark J. Pletcher, MD, MPH;
Mark J. Pletcher, MD, MPH
Departments of aEpidemiology and Biostatistics,
cMedicine, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, California
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Stephen B. Hulley, MD, MPH
Stephen B. Hulley, MD, MPH
Departments of aEpidemiology and Biostatistics,
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Address correspondence to Thomas B. Newman, MD, MPH, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, UCSF Box 0560, San Francisco, CA 94143. E-mail: [email protected]
FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE: Dr Pletcher has National Institutes of Health funding to support research on targeting of cholesterol-lowering medications for prevention of cardiovascular disease; and Drs Newman and Hulley have indicated they have no financial relationships relevant to this article to disclose.
Pediatrics (2012) 130 (2): 349–352.
Article history
Accepted:
May 21 2012
Citation
Thomas B. Newman, Mark J. Pletcher, Stephen B. Hulley; Overly Aggressive New Guidelines for Lipid Screening in Children: Evidence of a Broken Process. Pediatrics August 2012; 130 (2): 349–352. 10.1542/peds.2012-0481
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