Cholesterol Reduction and Life Expectancy

Excerpt

To the editor: Taylor and associates (1) use data from the Framingham Heart Study in an attempt to predict the impact of lowering blood cholesterol on life expectancy. They have created a mathematical model we believe is conceptually flawed. The coefficients used estimate 2-year, not long-term, risk. Their approach models temporal trajectories of cholesterol and other risk factors from which they create longitudinal survival data and calculate life expectancy. Unfortunately, to predict the life expectancy of a cohort of 20-year-old persons based on 2-year snippets of risk, the authors must create artificial continuities more than 30 times. Furthermore, instead of