the number of people
for whom statins are recommended," he said in a telephone
interview.

The increase is still lower than some estimates. In a blog
post on the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine
website on December 15, Dr. Jorge Bordenave, a cardiologist in
Coral Gables, Florida, estimated the number of new statin users
to be 31 million.

"There were a lot of opinions various experts expressed.
Some quoted really high numbers," said Michael Pencina, a
biostatistician at Duke University's Clinical Research
Institute, who led the study published on Wednesday.

NATIONAL HEALTH SURVEY

To arrive at a more precise number, Pencina's team used data
from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys
(NHANES), a representative survey of the U.S. population. The
researchers focused on 3,773 participants between 40-75 who had
provided detailed medical information, including fasting
cholesterol levels from blood tests.

They compared recommendations for statinuse under the new
guidelines and the prior guidelines and extrapolated that number
to the U.S. population of 115 million adults aged 40 to 75.

Based on the analysis, the new guidelines could result in 49
percent of adults in that age range being recommended for statin
therapy, an increase of 12.8 million people who would be newly
eligible for a statin recommendation, a 38 percent increase from
the older guidelines.

The increase was especially pronounced among adults over 60,
with 77 percent recommended for statin use versus 48 percent
under the prior guidelines.

That compared with an increase of between 27 percent and 30
percent among U.S. adults between the ages of 40 and 60.

The biggest impact of the change is among older healthy men
who are not on statins. Under the earlier guidelines, some 30
percent of men age 60