A.M. Vitals: More Aggressive Cholesterol Screening for Kids to Be Advised

Screening Kids: Guidelines expected to be presented Sunday by members of National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute panel will call for screening more kids for high cholesterol, the Associated Press reports. Panel members wouldn’t reveal details of the new recommendations ahead of the presentation — which will be at a meeting of the American Heart Association — but said they would include “more aggressive recommendations for cholesterol screening and treatment in children,” the AP says.

Waiting for Monday: Will cases concerning the health-care overhaul law be reviewed by the Supreme Court soon? On Monday at 10 a.m. the court will issue its next round of orders on pending cases, the WSJ’s Law Blog reports, which means there could be some health-law news then. Kaiser Health News has a helpful scoreboard tracking challenges to the law.

Oops: Brain researchers say presidential candidate Rick Perry’s debate gaffe the other night — he couldn’t come up with the third federal agency he’d like to see axed — can be explained by several different possible mechanisms, the New York Times’ Well blog reports. Distraction, a racing mind, interference from past memories or stress all could have interfered with the candidate’s brain’s ability to retrieve the information he was searching for, the NYT says.

Controversial Notion: Results from a 26-patient study published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest alcoholics with very severe hepatitis needn’t wait until they have been sober for six months before they receive a life-saving liver transplant, the Associated Press reports. That idea is likely to be controversial since donor organs are already in short supply, with more than 1,400 Americans dying in 2010 before they could receive a liver transplant, the AP says.

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Kids and Cholesterol: New Guidelines Recommend Testing 9-to-11-Year-Olds

Snips and snails and puppy dog tails — and cholesterol?

Well, no one’s saying little boys (or girls) are actually made of the stuff, but plenty of them have too much of it. So a panel appointed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute is recommending that all children between the ages of 9 and 11 be screened for high cholesterol.

As the Associated Press reports, the new guidelines, which are endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, were published online in Pediatrics today. They’ll be officially presented this weekend at a meeting of the American Heart Association.

As the WSJ has reported, heart disease begins to develop in childhood even if its major consequences — such as heart attacks — don’t generally occur until decades later. Research has found that risk factors including high cholesterol, if present at about age 9, can predict the thickening of neck-artery walls in early adulthood. And that, in turn, is a precursor to heart attacks and strokes, the paper reported.

A study of fifth-graders in West Virginia found that the previous guidelines for screening kids — which urged scrutiny only for those with a family history of heart problems or high cholesterol, or if the history wasn’t known — let some slip through the cracks. Almost 10% of kids who wouldn’t be checked according to those standards had abnormally high levels of LDL, or bad cholesterol.

Less than 1% of kids tested under the new guidelines would likely be advised to take cholesterol-lowering medications, the AP says; the rest would get advice on diet and exercise.

The new guidelines also advise on screening for diabetes, blood pressure, obesity and tobacco use.

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