
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 2, 1994                   TAG: 9411020062
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Medium

ARE ELDERLY GIVEN DRUGS FOR CHOLESTEROL IN VAIN?

A new study shows high cholesterol may not be much of a threat to healthy people over age 70, leading some to suggest doctors may be needlessly prescribing cholesterol-lowering drugs for many older patients.

People ages 71 to 104 with elevated cholesterol levels suffered no more heart attacks or deaths than their counterparts with normal cholesterol levels, the study of 997 people found.

``Cholesterol in older people may mean something very different than in younger people,'' said the lead author, Dr. Harlan Krumholz, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. He emphasized that more research is needed.

One possibility is that cholesterol levels in the old may not reflect lifelong levels. Another is that people who have survived with high cholesterol may be more resistant to its artery-clogging potential than other people, the researchers said in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Previous research on high cholesterol in elderly has yielded confusing findings, an American Heart Association spokesman said.

At least two large studies have found that high cholesterol increased the likelihood of heart problems, and at least four found that such levels did not, said Dr. John Brunzell, who was not involved in the new research.

The apparent conflict may be explained by the varying health of elderly people enrolled in the studies, said Brunzell, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The studies in which cholesterol seemed harmful in later life involved unusually healthy subjects, he said. For such people, heart disease may occur much later in life, and high cholesterol may play a role, he said.

For groups more representative of the population - as in the new study and the four others that found high cholesterol to be benign in the elderly - heart disease may already have occurred at earlier ages, he said.

More than 2 million Americans over age 65 are being treated with drugs to lower high cholesterol levels, and many may be getting treatment unnecessarily, an editorial accompanying the study suggested.

Cholesterol-lowering drugs can be expensive, can have uncomfortable side effects and may increase the risk of other causes of death, such as cancer, the editorial said.

Contrary to federal recommendations, ``elderly people in their late 70s and beyond generally should not be screened or treated for high blood cholesterol,'' said the editorial, by Drs. Stephen Hulley and Thomas Newman of the University of California, San Francisco.

by CNB