Just after publication in 1992 of reports by the National Cholesterol Education Program and the American Academy of Pediatrics on cholesterol screening in children, I asked the late Dr Ronald M. Lauer, who chaired both reports, why he advocated for opportunistic, rather than for universal, cholesterol screening in children.1 He answered with a question, “Do you really need to know a child’s cholesterol level to provide advice on heart disease prevention?” Dr Lauer was a visionary and founded the Muscatine Study, with goals of understanding the distribution of cardiovascular risk factors in children, their tracking into adulthood, and their associations with markers of subclinical cardiovascular injury and cardiovascular outcomes in adulthood.
In this issue of Pediatrics, Nuotio and colleagues use data provided by the Muscatine Study and 6 other studies (the i3Ccollaborative) to provide an answer to this question: No.2 The authors were able to show that...
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