Cholesterol

What should I do?

I'm not really a big fat eater to begin with. — Margaret L., TalentMedical tests, like anything else, always need to be interpreted in the appropriate context, says Dr.

Brian Gross, a Medford cardiologist.Scientific studies have shown that But everybody does not have an equal chance of having a heart attack.

Age, family history, gender and life habits all play a role.To make an informed decision about taking statins, a person needs to know what the relative risk of having a heart attack or stroke would be if he or she chose not take the drugs."You need to pick your population carefully," Gross says.

"A higher-risk population does better" with statins.Gross says a tool called Framingham analysis can help ordinary mortals understand the concept.

It's a formula that determines a person's relative future cardiac risk by incorporating age, gender, blood pressure, waist size and It's named for the same Massachusetts town that was the site of one of the pioneering studies in cardiac health.Consider, for example, an...

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