Heart Health
Should Obama Take a Drug to Lower His Cholesterol? The Answer Will Surprise You
By
Mar 5, 2010 - 4:55:02 PM

(HealthNewsDigest.com) - When President Obama’s recent physical exam revealed that he had elevated cholesterol levels, we wondered: Does the president need to take a drug to lower his cholesterol? (Hey, we’re the Consumer Reports Health folks—we like to ask these questions.)To answer that, we used a handy calculator from the National Cholesterol Education Program to determine his 10-year risk of heart attack or death from a cardiac-related event. We plugged in his figures from WhiteHouse.gov’s full release of his exam results (pdf):

Age: 48
Gender: Male
Total Cholesterol: 209 mg/dL
HDL Cholesterol: 62 mg/dL
Smoker: Yes*
Systolic Blood Pressure: 105 mm/Hg
On medication for HBP (high blood pressure): No
*You should know that for this calculator, you are considered a smoker if you light up just once during the previous month. For our purposes, we know the president said he quit smoking. But we will assume that since he also "occasionally falls off the wagon," that he has done so in the last month.

The calculator told us he has a 10-year risk of heart attack or death from a cardiac-related event equal to 7 percent.
Now, President Obama has three things going for him:
He’s fairly young.
He has a high HDL (good) cholesterol at 62 mg/dL.
And, he has very low resting blood pressure at 105/62 mm/Hg.
All three of these give him a good deal of protection. And regardless of your age, these last two points are important to pay attention to.
So we wondered: How can the president reduce that risk even more?

His elevated cholesterol triggered his doctor to recommend that he improve his diet (Obama already exercises). His physician suggested he get his LDL (bad) cholesterol levels down from 138 to under 130 mg/dL—the lowest number considered “borderline high.” If the president did only that, it would drop his total cholesterol to 200, but his risk stays the same at 7 percent.
Let’s say he could get that LDL number down further, either by diet, exercise or even from taking a cholesterol-lowering medication—from 138 to under 100 (an optimal level)—it would bring his total cholesterol level down to 170 mg/dL. He then lowers his risk slightly to 5 percent, according to the calculator. (That’s still pretty good—it reduces his 10-year risk from 7 percent to 5 percent, which is a 29 percent relative-risk reduction).

But here’s what raised our eyebrows: Even if Obama kept his cholesterol level as is, but truly quit smoking, his 10-year risk plummets to 2 percent (which is a striking 71 percent risk reduction).

Wonder what happens if Obama lowers his bad cholesterol levels to 99 mg/dL and quits smoking? That seems to offer no more protection than just giving up smoking: His risk stays at 2 percent.

The moral of the story? The president should fully snuff out smoking first and foremost. And our guess is if the Secret Service knew that the president could cut his chance of dying or having a heart attack by 5 percent, they would do something about it.

Plug your own numbers into the calculator and then adjust for a few of these factors. It’s a useful way to determine your overall risk of heart attack and death due to heart problems (assuming you don’t have diabetes or already have heart disease). Perhaps it could spur some lifestyle changes to reduce your risk as well.

For those of you who find that your high risk warrants attention, and lifestyle changes alone aren’t enough, see our Best Buy Drugs report on drugs to treat high cholesterol.

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