Doctors fail to cut cholesterol enough

Only half of patients at high risk of heart disease are given the right targets for cutting their cholesterol and millions may suffer heart attack or stroke due to doctors' poor advice, scientists said on Thursday.

German researchers said that over 10 years, around 50 to 80 heart attacks, strokes and heart disease-related deaths per 1,000 patients could be averted if all doctors correctly followed guidelines on cholesterol-lowering targets.

"The numbers highlight the enormous health implications ... in our findings," said Heribert Schunkert, who led the study into more than 25,000 patients in Germany.

Drugs called statins, like Pfizer's Lipitor or AstraZeneca's

Crestor, which lower cholesterol and have been credited with preventing millions of heart attacks and strokes, are often prescribed to patients with high heart risk.

But Schunkert, of the University Clinic of Schleswig Holstein in Luebeck, said guidelines on how much cholesterol should be brought down in each type of patient may be too complex. Doctors often failed, especially with women patients, to recognize the risk and set the right goals, he said.

"Efforts should be made to make guidelines simpler and easier to understand and follow, instruments to identify high-risk patients more easily should be developed, and special attention should be paid to women," he wrote in a commentary on the study, which was published in the European Heart Journal.