Can Earlier LDL-C Lowering Change the Trajectory of Cardiovascular Disease?
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
A thought-provoking simultaneous publication new
@ProfKausikRay published in
@AJPCardio presented at
@society_eas yesterday revisits one of the central questions in prevention:
Are we intervening too late?
Using data from 17 randomized lipid-lowering trials involving more than 105,000 participants, Karungi and colleagues examined how the relative cardiovascular benefit of LDL-C lowering changes across different baseline risk levels.
The findings are intriguing.
1. Contrary to the traditional assumption that lower-risk individuals derive only modest benefit, the investigators observed that relative risk reduction per 1 mmol/L LDL-C lowering was actually greater in lower-risk primary prevention populations.
2. In trial populations with annualized event rates around 1% per year, each mmol/L LDL-C reduction was associated with roughly a 36% relative reduction in events, compared with approximately 13% in populations with event rates near 3% per year.
The paper bring to light an important conceptual framework.
1. As atherosclerosis advances, larger LDL-C reductions may be required to achieve the same proportional benefit.
2. In lower-risk and presumably earlier-stage disease, even modest LDL-C reductions may yield meaningful relative risk reduction.
This shifts the discussion from simply “who is high risk today?” toward a broader life-course perspective:
1. Are we waiting long before intervening?
2. Can modest but earlier LDL-C lowering alter cumulative vascular exposure before disease becomes biologically irreversible?
3. Should early primary prevention become more central to our prevention frameworks?
I think the implications extend beyond statins alone. For the future we need to think around long-duration therapies, , AI-guided risk prediction, imaging-guided prevention, and cumulative LDL exposure increasingly points toward a future where prevention may begin earlier, become more personalized, and focus more on preserving vascular health before advanced disease develops.
@ASPCardio @rblument1