Scandinavian children with familial hypercholesterolemia are underdiagnosed and undertreated

Despite the new European guidelines’ recommendation that patients with familial hypercholesterolemia should initiate statin treatment form an early age (between 8 and 10 years), children suffering from familial hypercholesterolemia in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway are still underdiagnosed and undertreated. Until recently, the number of children treated with statin was unknown. Therefore, Karianne Svendsen (University of Oslo, Norway) and colleagues aimed to describe the number of statin users younger than 19 years in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway [1]. The authors assumed that the number of children who would be using statins is equivalent to a positive familial hypercholesterolemia diagnosis in these three Nordic countries. As the estimated frequency of familial hypercholesterolemia is 1:250, the number of expected children suffering from the disease per year could be calculated. They then calculated the percentage of all children with familial hypercholestero...

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Posted on 10 October, 2019