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News / Headlines
Contact: Daniel Keeney, APR
DPK Public Relations
832.467.2904
dan@dpkpr.com
SHAPE Statement Reacting to ACCF/AHA Guidelines on
Cardiovascular Risk Assessment in Asymptomatic Adults
CHICAGO, November 17, 2010 - SHAPE, The Society for Heart Attack
Prevention and Eradication (http://www.shapesociety.org),
a nonprofit organization that promotes early detection and
preventive intervention to reduce heart attack risk, today issued a
statement regarding the American College of Cardiology
Foundation/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice
Guidelines’ release of “2010 ACCF/AHA Guideline for Assessment of
Cardiovascular Risk in Asymptomatic Adults.” The guideline was
released online this week and will be published in the December
14/21, 2010 edition of the Journal of the American College of
Cardiology.
The following should be attributed to Dr. PK Shah, chairman of the
SHAPE Scientific Board and director, Division of Cardiology at
Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and Medical Center in Los Angeles:
After nearly a decade of work to encourage the widespread adoption
of atherosclerosis tests for a subset of apparently healthy people
who unknowingly have hidden heart disease (The SHAPE Guidelines
published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 2006), we
welcome these new practice guidelines and believe they represent a
breakthrough. For the first time, the ACCF/AHA Task Force on
Practice Guidelines has acknowledged the value of coronary artery
calcium scoring (CACS) and carotid artery intima-media thickness (CIMT)
scanning by ultrasound for cardiovascular risk assessment in subsets
of asymptomatic subjects.
We hope these new practice guidelines will provide the peace-of-mind
physicians need to encourage intermediate risk patients to undergo
CACS or CIMT scanning. Of course, other obstacles to widespread
testing remain, including insurance reimbursement for the tests. We
expect the growing consensus of the efficacy of these
atherosclerosis tests will significantly advance efforts to expand
reimbursement so all patients who can benefit from the tests have
access to them.
Our enthusiasm about this victory is tempered by the ACCF/AHA Task
Force stopping short of an outright recommendation of the two
atherosclerosis tests recommended by SHAPE. We believe the evidence
is sufficient to recommend CACS or CIMT scanning for risk assessment
of men 45-80 years of age and women 55-80 years of age who have a
Framingham Risk Score of 6% or greater. By stating that a test “is
reasonable,” the ACCF/AHA Task Force has removed doubt about the
tests, but the absence of a stronger Class 1 recommendation may
create uncertainty. SHAPE believes that the tests should be
recommended. The updated SHAPE II Guidelines provide a simple and
sensible approach to implement these tests in clinical practice.
However, the new ACC/AHA Guidelines are a giant leap from the
skepticism and outright opposition expressed in the past. Physicians
who advise their asymptomatic intermediate risk patients to undergo
the tests are no longer at odds with the major practice guidelines.
We applaud the ACCF/AHA Task Force for carefully examining the
advances in research and practice that clearly illustrate the
effectiveness of CACS and CIMT scanning for assessing an
individual’s cardiovascular risk. We will be forever grateful to the
research teams and their sponsors who enabled this enormous advance
in heart attack risk detection, including the Atherosclerosis Risk
in Communities Study (ARIC) and the Multi-Ethnic Study of
Atherosclerosis (MESA), sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and
Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, and
the Heinz Nixdorf Recall Study, funded by the Heinz Nixdorf
Foundation and the German Foundation of Research.
About the Society for Heart Attack Prevention and Eradication
(SHAPE):
The mission of SHAPE (www.shapesociety.org) is to eradicate heart
attack by championing new strategies for prevention while advancing
the scientific quest for a cure. SHAPE visualizes a world free from
the threat of heart attack. The goals of SHAPE are to reduce the
instances of heart attack - especially in the asymptomatic patient -
through education programs presented to both healthcare
professionals and the community. SHAPE believes that education and
ongoing research are key elements in the success of programs
designed to go beyond the norm in the early detection and treatment
of cardiovascular disease.
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