COMMENTARY

How Do New Statin Guidelines Affect Diabetes Care?

Anne L. Peters, MD

Disclosures

November 21, 2013

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In This Article

Hi. This is Dr. Anne Peters, from the University of Southern California. Today I'm going to talk about the new American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) guidelines[1] for the treatment of dyslipidemia and risk for cardiovascular disease.

Many of you have probably already read these guidelines and have some understanding about what they mean. I want to discuss them from my perspective as a clinician and then discuss how they affect patients with diabetes.

First of all, I want to commend the authors for doing this -- for trying to write new evidence-based guidelines that really shift how we think about the treatment of lipid disorders. As one of the authors of the new diabetes position statement on the treatment of hyperglycemia, I know how hard it is both to review the evidence as well as to come away with conclusions that can help guide our treatment of patients.

The key to these new guidelines is to not look at numbers as targets but rather to look at risk, to see which of our patients are at highest risk for cardiovascular events, and then to treat them accordingly.

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