Researchers at Dartmouth Medical School and the Veterans Affairs Outcomes Group at the White River Junction, Vt., VA Medical Center show that adding CRP testing to routine assessments would increase the number of Americans eligible for cholesterol-lowering treatment by about 2 million if used judiciously, and by more than 25 million if used broadly -- with most of these people being at low risk for heart attacks or heart disease.


The authors argue that the medical community should focus energies on treating high-risk patients before expanding the pool to include so many low-risk patients.

There is a push to use this test, and that probably doesn't make much sense, says Steven Woloshin, one of the authors on the paper and an associate professor at Dartmouth University Medical School. The study is published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.