You can have FH and a normal lifespan!

I put this below in response to Mike's post, but worth repeating separately

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi...

It's another piece on FH risk.

"The CVD burden from FH differs considerably from patient to patient. This was already recognized in 1966 when Harlan et al. reported normal survival in a large FH pedigree [28]. Recently, this was confirmed by three different mortality studies, carried out in the UK and the Netherlands [2, 3, 29]. In addition to patients with serious excess CVD mortality, many patients were observed having a normal lifespan."

Exactly the point I have been making futilely - to the many professionals I have seen. If I have got FH then one of my parents had it. They both lived to 72, despite having been smokers for about 30 and 40 years respectively - at the time they died average life expectancy was 76. Plus my mother had 6 children which doubles a woman's risk of heart disease. None of my siblings or cousins have developed heart disease, despite them being aged from their 50's to 70, though two of my cousins died of caner

Yet when we see consultants we still get scaremongering and are told we are automatically at high risk even if we are just possible FH. And all this does is cause stress which - oh so ironically - probably raises our risk of heart disease!

[Hidden]

Another full text study here. Interesting this one because it was 1991 and therefore predates statin use.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/193...

[DakCB-UK in reply to Hidden]

Are you sure? I know that Zocor (patented simvastatin) was being prescribed by Oxford's lipid clinic (listed as the coordinating centre of that study) in the 1980s, although bile acid sequestrants (Questran, Colestid, ...) were much more widely used.

[Hidden in reply to DakCB-UK]

as far as I know the first statin wasn't introduced commercially until 1987 in the USA and they weren't used in the UK until the mid 90's. It was also lovastatin that was patented first.

My father died in the early 90's and was never offered a statin.

[DakCB-UK in reply to Hidden]

Sorry but they were in use in the UK in the 1980s by some clinics for some patients. Maybe it was as part of clinical trials (I was a bit young to understand such things then) but they were being used.

[Hidden]

WOSCOPS the major UK trial was published in 1995.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/756...

[DakCB-UK in reply to Hidden]

This 1987 paper refers to clinical trials of statins already going on in Europe by that date ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/331...

[Hidden in reply to DakCB-UK]

Yes, but drugs aren't in general use when trials are going on.