Regardless of the excessive hopes for the brand new exams, there are various questions.
Some critics say {that a} concentrate on treating youthful individuals is misplaced as a result of they could not adjust to taking a statin or one other drug for the remainder of their lives. It may be troublesome for younger individuals to concentrate on potential threats to their well being a long time sooner or later, and a few of Dr. Rader’s sufferers have postpone even getting polygenic threat exams after he recommends them.
The true want, these critics say, is with the large group of older individuals who want cholesterol-lowering remedy however should not getting it, or who’re abandoning their prescriptions. In a single research, about 40 % of individuals 65 and older who had a coronary heart assault and wish lipid-lowering medicines for the remainder of their lives cease taking statins inside two years.
Others, like Dr. Rita F. Redberg, a heart specialist on the College of California, San Francisco, the editor at JAMA Inside Medication and a critic of the overuse of statins, is worried that polygenic threat scores may introduce new issues.
“There may be lots of draw back to labeling individuals with a illness,” she stated.
The label, she added, “inexorably results in exams and a seek for therapies.” And, she stated, “as a result of the individual, who now has change into a ‘affected person,’ is asymptomatic, extra exams and potential therapies most often is not going to make the individual really feel any higher.”
Individuals can go from pondering of themselves as wholesome to pondering of themselves as somebody with a illness. “Now, every time they expertise the widespread aches, pains and twinges of life, they marvel whether it is as a result of they’ve this ‘illness,’” Dr. Redberg stated. “And so they might then go to the physician and even emergency room for issues they might not have beforehand. And that additionally will result in extra exams and procedures, with their attendant threat of harms.”
