Are Fasting Lipid Determinations Really Necessary?

Current guidelines on treating patients with high cholesterol to prevent adverse cardiovascular (CV) events support risk stratification of patients on the basis of fasting lipid panels (NEJM JW Gen Med Nov 12 2013). But does a fasting lipid determination allow better prognostication of all-cause and CV-related mortality than do nonfasting results? To answer this question, researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey and National Death Index on 16,000 middle-aged adults who were followed for 14 years. Propensity score matching was used to create fasting and nonfasting cohorts with similar characteristics. Fasting was defined as not eating for ≥8 hours before blood draw.

For the primary outcome of all-cause mortality, fa…