If you are at moderate or high risk of a heart attack or stroke your cholesterol levels should be treated more aggressively, says a panel from the National Cholesterol Education Program, USA. The panel will soon release its guidelines.

The guidelines include when to start treating the patient with statins. Statins are cholesterol-lowering drugs. Currently, if a person's LDL cholesterol values are 130 milligrams per decilitre or more they should be treated with statins (LDLs are the bad cholesterol). The new guidelines will say that patients should start on statins when their LDL levels rise above 100.

The panel says that those who are at very high risk should have their LDL levels brought right down to below 70 milligrams per decilitre.

You can read what the panel had to say in full in the journal Circulation. The National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Foundation and the American College of Cardiology have all endorsed the recommendations.