By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – Ladies’s coronary heart illness dangers and their want to start out taking preventive medicines needs to be evaluated when they’re of their 30s reasonably than effectively after menopause as is now the observe, mentioned researchers who printed a examine on Saturday.

Presenting the findings on the European Society of Cardiology annual assembly in London, they mentioned the examine confirmed for the primary time that straightforward blood assessments make it potential to estimate a girl’s danger of heart problems over the following three a long time.

“This is good for patients first and foremost, but it is also important information for (manufacturers of) cholesterol lowering drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs, and lipoprotein(a)lowering drugs – the implications for therapy are broad,” mentioned examine chief Dr. Paul Ridker of Brigham and Ladies’s Hospital in Boston.

Present pointers “suggest to physicians that women should generally not be considered for preventive therapies until their 60s and 70s. These new data… clearly demonstrate that our guidelines need to change,” Ridker mentioned. “We should transfer past discussions of 5 or 10 yr danger.”

The 27,939 participants in the long-term Women’s Health Initiative study had blood tests between 1992 and 1995 for low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C or “bad cholesterol”), which are already a part of routine care.

They also had tests for high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) – a marker of blood vessel inflammation – and lipoprotein(a), a genetically determined type of fat.

Compared to risks in women with the lowest levels of each marker, risks for major cardiovascular events like heart attacks or strokes over the next 30 years were 36% higher in women with the highest levels of LDL-C, 70% higher in women with the highest levels of hsCRP, and 33% higher in those with the highest levels of lipoprotein(a).

Women in whom all three markers were in the highest range were 2.6 times more likely to have a major cardiovascular event and 3.7 times more likely to have a stroke over the next three decades, according to a report of the study in The New England Journal of Medicine published to coincide with the presentation at the meeting.

“The three biomarkers are fully independent of each other and tell us about different biologic issues each individual woman faces,” Ridker said.

“The therapies we might use in response to an elevation in each biomarker are markedly different, and physicians can now specifically target the individual person’s biologic problem.”

While drugs that lower LDL-C and hsCRP are widely available – including statins and certain pills for high blood pressure and heart failure – drugs that reduce lipoprotein(a) levels are still in development by companies, including Novartis (S:), Amgen (NASDAQ:) , Eli Lilly (NYSE:) and London-based Silence Therapeutics.

In some circumstances, way of life adjustments comparable to exercising and quitting smoking could be useful.

Many of the girls within the examine have been white People, however the findings would doubtless “have even greater impact among Black and Hispanic women for whom there is even a higher prevalence of undetected and untreated inflammation,” Ridker mentioned.

“This is a global problem,” he added. “We need universal screening for hsCRP … and for lipoprotein(a), just as we already have universal screening for cholesterol.”