Description
The busy clinician needs to be knowledgeable about best practices for an ever expanding array of conditions. Dyslipidemia is a widely prevalent and highly heterogeneous condition. Clinical lipidology is a newly recognized specialty in medicine. Our understanding of how lipids and lipoproteins influence risk for cardiovascular disease is evolving rapidly. The pace of research and the sheer volume of new information offered by clinical trials are challenging to keep up with for even the most astute clinician.
Clinical Challenges in Lipid Disorders is published at an opportune time. Many important, recent developments in clinical lipidology warrant immediate application in clinical practice. This book was not intended to be encyclopedic in scope. Instead its aim is to focus on important day-to-day questions that the busy clinician might want to have quickly yet authoritatively answered. These questions are among the most frequently asked by primary care and specialty audiences at national and international conferences, and they poignantly reflect where potential gaps in knowledge about dyslipidemia exist. Addressing these questions in an evidence-based manner is fundamental to any effort directed at improving the identification and management of all forms of dyslipidemia. In that context, this book may be viewed as being particularly comprehensive in nature.
Clinical Challenges in Lipid Disorders covers the basic and clinical science of dyslipidemias. In so doing, it thoughtfully addresses aspects of the diagnosis and management of dyslipidemias where the available data can be quite unsettled and confusing. Such is the case for the chapters addressing the diagnosis and management of children, women, the elderly, those with familial hypercholesterolemia, as well as the newly hospitalized patient with an acute coronary syndrome. Chapters focused on Framingham risk scoring, the metabolic syndrome, low HDL-cholesterol, and elevated non-HDL-cholesterol are worthy of careful reading. This book is also particularly informative on the topics of fibrate therapy, niacin use, and the oft debated use of nutriceuticals and dietary supplements as lipid-altering therapies. Clinical Challenges in Lipid Disorders also contains a large amount of information related to various aspects of statin therapy, including proposed pleiotropic effects as well as insightful discussions of the muscle and hepatic side effects that seem to weigh heavily on the use of this drug class. As the reader will quickly determine, this book both recognizes and answers the most pervasive questions in the field of clinical lipidology and does so with a cutting edge balance between conceptual development and clinical utility. It is our ardent hope that this information will empower healthcare providers of all disciplines to more aggressively identify and treat the many forms of lipid disorder encountered in daily practice.