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Judith D. Bentkover, PhD
Arthur D. Little, Inc Cambridge, Mass

JAMA. 1991;265(15):1949.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

In their cost-effectiveness analysis of alternative pharmaceutical therapies for high blood cholesterol levels, Schulman et al¹ do a good job of summarizing the literature relevant to a major national health goal, lowering total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels of 5% to 10% of middle-aged men in the United States plus an unidentified percentage of older men and women. However, one must be careful fully to understand the limitations of their methods before leaping to a position of advocacy concerning any programmatic policy measures that are alleged to reduce costs.

First, as the authors point out in the first section of their article, serum cholesterol is used as a proxy for coronary heart disease (CHD) morbidity and mortality. Although there is no disagreement that high cholesterol levels put one at risk for an adverse CHD outcome, there is some variation in the relationship between unit or . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by Drummond Rennie, MD, Deputy Editor (West), and Don Riesenberg, MD, Senior Editor.

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