Youth cholesterol tests 'could save lives'

Doctors want to catch heart disease earlier

Teenagers in the UK should be screened for high levels of cholesterol as part of efforts to reduce heart disease, doctors have said.

Doctors from Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford have suggested that teenagers who have a history of heart problems in their family should be identified and screened for high cholesterol.

They add that screening all 16-year-olds may be a cost effective way of fighting heart disease.

The doctors say current methods for detecting cholesterol problems are inadequate because many of those at risk are not identified until middle age.

This, they say, is too late and leaves many people at increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.

The doctors studied a group of patients living in Oxfordshire who were on the Simon Broome register - a register of people from a family with a record of high cholesterol or familial hyperlipidaemia.

This is something that is worth evaluating in terms of the NHS

Dr David Matthews, Radcliffe Infirmary

They found that just one in four cases were diagnosed routinely by GPs and that the vast majority remained undetected until middle age.

"The main implication of underdiagnosis is that patients are denied early treatment to reduce the risk of coronary events," they said.

Writing in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, they suggest that testing people with early onset heart disease and the children of those who die early would help to tackle the problem.

They add that a specialist nurse working in general practice should be used to track families and to test relatives of people who have already been identified with problems.

'Easily identifiable'

Dr David Matthews, a consultant physician at Radcliffe Infirmary, said health officials should consider introducing systematic screening for high cholesterol.

"This is something that is worth evaluating in terms of the NHS. Early coronary heart disease is something that is very easily identifiable."

He said low levels of detection by doctors was because the symptoms of heart disease do not develop until late.

But he added that early screening would help the NHS to treat patients before they reached such a point.

A spokeswoman for the British Heart Foundation said: "One in 500 people have familial hyperlipidaemia so it is vital that the children whose parents have this condition receive screening. It remains to be seen whether all 16 year-olds should be screened."

She added: "The mechanism for finding these children is the difficulty because it involves cross-referencing patient details and developing comprehensive databases."