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New Cholesterol and Hypertension Guidelines

By Michael Maccia posted 07-31-2015 15:15

  

Ever since the updated cholesterol guidelines and JNC 8 for hypertension were released, I have heard a lot of confusion and frustration from my fellow pharmacists. Both of these new releases were very different than their probably outdated predecessors. The cholesterol guidelines completely went away from any number based goals for LDL or total cholesterol and treat patients with either moderate or high-dose statins based on a patient's current disease state or estimated risk of cardiac event. On the other hand, JNC8 adjusted initial therapy for patients based on race and also changed a variety of their hypertension goals. To me, I was also confused as to why these guidelines were dramatically different from the ones that we ingrained in my head during pharmacy school and residency.

Since the release of these guidelines, I had finished my residency and began my career as a clinical pharmacist in Emergency Medicine at a hospital in Montgomery, AL. As a result of this, these guidelines were not a focus when looking for new literature to read to apply to my practice in the ER. However, I was still curious as to why these guidelines included what they did. Well, thank you to becoming and ASHP BPS Ambassador and the ability to complete a literature review module on the background to both of these guidelines. Even though a lot of this information does not pertain to my practice, it was exciting to see and understand the literature behind the decisions made in these current guidelines. As a result, I am a lot less confused as to the recommendations made and mostly agree with the statements made in these guidelines. In the future, I hope some of the lesser evidence or expert opinion recommendations can establish better evidence, but as a whole, I am glad to be able to see the background to these guidelines.

 I am now looking forward to the next release of BPS modules and hope to learn a lot more during the next few months of completing these modules. 

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