Are You Ready For Flintstone Chewable Statins?

New American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines call for kids as young as 8 to get cholesterol-lowering drugs.

DANIEL S. LEVINE

The other day, when I opened the top to our outdoor gas grill to throw on some burgers, I discovered bright blue bricks sitting on aluminum foil. I quickly shut it off and sought out my wife. “Did you put rat poison on the grill?” I asked. It turns out she had meant to mention it, but had forgotten, and assured me she wasn’t trying to kill me for the insurance money.

A few days before, I had discovered her obsessively scrubbing the grill. She had found a rat inside. This is the unpleasant part of California living for which Sunset magazine hadn't quite prepared us. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether to be more disturbed by the problem of having a rat in my grill or the solution my wife had devised for dealing with the situation.

It was a similar response that I had today when I learned that the American Academy of Pediatrics had issued new cholesterol screening and treatment recommendations for children.

The pediatric group wants kids as young as 2 with a family history of high cholesterol or heart disease to be screened. Kids with an unknown family history or those with other risk factors for heart disease such as obesity, high blood pressure, or diabetes, should also be screened, according to the guidelines. The test should be repeated in three years for kids with levels of cholesterol within a normal range. The recommendations can be found in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics.

For kids at least 8 who have high concentrations of low-density lipoproteins or LDLs (the bad cholesterol), the guidelines recommend that doctors prescribing cholesterol-reducing medications to patients with cholesterol levels of at least 190 mg/dL (or at least 160 mg/dL and a family history of early heart disease).

This comes in addition to recommendations about diet and exercise, but I wasn’t sure whether to be mortified that the obesity epidemic has gotten so bad that pediatricians now have to worry about adolescents having coronaries on the playground or that kids now have to wash down their Ritalin with Statins.

I asked a pediatrician I know for a response to the new guidelines. In the past, she had complained to me about parents unwilling to vaccinate their kids, so I asked if she was prepared to deal with parents who were told their kids need to be on statins.

“When they die of heart attacks at 38,” she said, “maybe they will change their tune.”