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Richard Drury/DigitalVision/Getty Images By Erin Garcia de Jesús March 26, 2026 at 9:00 am Share this:Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print New heart health recommendations emphasize early testing and treatment to lower cholesterol levels as key to reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. A group of 11 medical associations including the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association released new guidelines on March 13 to help doctors and their patients manage cholesterol levels. The recommendations advise first testing cholesterol in childhood, around age 10, with the aim of helping patients keep levels low, reducing the chances a heart attack or a stroke might happen decades in the future. Also new is a cardiovascular risk calculator called PREVENT that is designed to assess heart attack and stroke risk over the next 10 and 30 years in adults 30-79 years old who don’t already have heart disease. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. The previous recommendations, released in 2018, relied on another calculator that was based on clinical data from a cohort of around 25,000 adults who participated in U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored studies, says Roger Blumenthal, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. That calculator looked forward just 10 years. What’s more, the guidelines did not have specific cholesterol benchmarks for people with different levels of risk based on family or medical history. PREVENT, on the other hand, is based on studies that included a total of 6.6 million people, helping to better estimate short- and long-term risks on an individual basis, Blumenthal says. The new guidance also emphasizes additional tests that are not part of the standard cholesterol blood test, or lipid panel, including a one-time assessment of lipoprotein(a), or Lp(a). Levels of Lp(a) are determined by genetics and can increase the long-term risk of heart attack or stroke. Roughly a quarter of U.S. adults have high levels of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, cholesterol. Reducing these “bad” cholesterol levels with lifestyle changes such as healthy eating and exercise or with medications can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death globally. Science News spoke with Blumenthal, who chaired the guideline writing committee, to learn more about the new recommendations and how the shifts might impact treatment. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. SN: What are the most important changes in the guidelines? Blumenthal: I’ll start with number one, which essentially is to assess and treat early. We recommended — especially if there’s any family history of heart disease, or if there’s another cardiovascular risk factor — that the clinician should screen with a lipid panel around age 10 and again around age 20 and then every five years after that. We also made the point that, especially if you’re age 30 and above and your LDL cholesterol is 160 or higher on successive occasions, it certainly makes se
Start cholesterol tests in childhood, new guidelines say
