The World Health Organization predicts Cardiovascular Disease will be the leading cause of death in developing countries worldwide by 2010. Cardiovascular Disease has long been the leading cause of death in many industrialized nations.
Cardiovascular Disease, including heart disease and stroke, affects approximately 30% of the world’s population, resulting in 17 million deaths a year worldwide. Furthermore, 25% of those who die suddenly from Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) did not experience prior symptoms.1
The imperative to prevent the first clinical episode is therefore correspondingly high. If patients at higher risk for developing CAD can be identified early in the course of their illness, it is reasonable to expect improved outcomes.
Guidelines recommend that risk factor assessment in adults should begin as early as age 20 and that all adults who are 40 or over should know their absolute risk of developing CAD.2
Identifying patients with subclinical cardiovascular disease who could benefit from intensive primary prevention measures to prevent a first event is imperative.
Our goal is to assist you, as a healthcare professional, to identify the risk for CAD early and effectively treat - or perhaps prevent the onset altogether.
The PREVU* POC Skin Sterol Test is a simple, noninvasive method of cardiovascular risk determination.
Studies have concluded that cholesterol in the skin (skin cholesterol) can be considered a surrogate marker of atherosclerosis. The PREVU* POC Test quantifies the amount of epidermal cholesterol.
The PREVU* POC Test produces a numeric test result with a range from 50 to 265. These numbers do not relate in any way to the numbers that are traditionally used for measures of serum lipids. The range of skin cholesterol values in a normal population compared to a population with a known elevated risk for CAD is shown below.3 Any patient may be evaluated against the continuum of data to see their relative risk against a larger population; however, for purposes of convenience, a skin cholesterol value of 110 is usually chosen as the value at which patients acquire an increased burden of risk. As the skin cholesterol value increases, each 10-unit increase in skin cholesterol augments the burden by an additional 7%. As a further clinical bench mark, when skin cholesterol values exceed 134 in the Sprecher study, less than 5% of normal controls could be identified in such a cohort of patients.
