Accuracy of lipid profiles in the hospital setting: Impact on the initiation of cholesterol-lowering therapy

Hospitalization for an acute ec ent. such as myocardial infarction. is an opportune time for screening lipids, counseling patients, and advising them about treatments. Physicians frequently fail to seize these "windows of opportunity" that hospitalization presents. The hospital setting may be the best time to screen a patient's lipid levels and systems can be set up to accomplish this in a timely fashion. There are certain illnesses, procedures, and conditions under which a patient's lipids may be altered and these should be considered ui hcn about to undertake screening. The conventional Freidewald test appears to be as reliable as newer lipid-screening measures. Using this test, nonfasting lipids can reliably predict patients with elevated cholesterol.