A Heart Risk Factor Even Doctors Know Little About

A Heart Risk Factor Even Doctors Know Little About
Her LDL and total cholesterol levels were low, and at age 39, her Framingham risk score, which
gauges heart disease risk, put her odds of having a heart attack in her 40s at just 1 percent.
“The biggest challenge for patients is finding knowledgeable physicians who know about this and can help them.”
Dr. Lloyd-Jones at Northwestern said that testing for lp(a) should be considered for people with early-onset cardiovascular disease — which means younger than age 50 for men
and age 60 for women — or a strong family history of it.
While doctors routinely test for other lipoproteins like HDL
and LDL cholesterol, few test for lipoprotein(a), also known as lp(a), high levels of which triple the risk of having a heart attack or stroke at an early age.
Heart disease risk jumps for those in the 80th percentile, with lp(a) levels above 60,
and climbs sharply for the 5 percent of the population with lp(a) levels between 150 and 300, according to Dr. Ginsberg at Columbia.
To millions of Americans, Bob Harper was the picture of health, a celebrity fitness trainer
who whipped people into shape each week on the hit TV show “The Biggest Loser.”
But last February, Mr. Harper, 52, suffered a massive heart attack at a New York City gym and went into cardiac arrest.
“It’s sort of a double whammy,” said Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, a cardiologist at the Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine who helped write the American Heart Association’s cholesterol guidelines.