Measuring the cholesterol level of people aged 50 or over is the most efficient way of spotting those at risk of heart problems.
There are plenty of ways of helping people reduce their risk of heart disease - preventive medicines such as cholesterol-lowering statins, and lifestyle modification, for example. But how do we know who can benefit the most from these interventions?

Researchers at the William Harvey Research Institute in London studied a group of over 6,000 people aged between 30 and 74 with no history of heart attack. Four common screening tests were used to identify those with a heart risk of 15 per cent or more. This revealed that using simply age as a risk (being more than 50 years old) identified 93 per cent of those most at risk while requiring cholesterol testing in just 46 per cent of the population. This simple approach could help target preventive measures toward those who can most benefit.