"For a patient who we now know is at lower risk than we previously thought, if we recommend they stop taking statins, they still could be back to a higher risk five years down the road, for the simple reason that everybody's risk goes up as we get older," he said. The study compared the American Heart Association's (AHA's) 2023 guidelines with the 2013 American College of Cardiology guidelines. The AHA's most recent guidelines, which use PREVENT, a new risk-assessing equation, found that fewer people may need to take statins, a cholesterol-lowering drug. What Is PREVENT?The PREVENT equation is a risk calculator created by the American Heart Association to predict people's 10-year risk of atherosclerosis. While a tool already existed?"the pooled cohort equation (PCE)?"there were concerns that the PCE, which predicts risks based on sex- and race-specific factors, may overestimate cardiovascular risk because of underrepresentation in certain cohorts.