Reaching your treatment goals

Why is it so important to reach your target cholesterol levels? Because effective cholesterol treatment saves lives! Lowering cholesterol helps reduce your risk of heart disease, heart attacks, and death due to heart disease. Heart disease is the number 2 killer in Canada (second only to cancer), causing almost 30% of all deaths.

What can lifestyle changes do for you? Lifestyle changes are an important part of cholesterol and heart disease risk control. Healthy lifestyle changes can help people lower high cholesterol levels. For some people, lifestyle changes alone may be enough to keep cholesterol at a healthy level. Others will need medications as well.

The lower your cholesterol levels, the better. As your "bad" cholesterol levels drop, so does your risk of heart disease and death. To get your cholesterol down low enough, you may need a prescription medication in addition to your healthy lifestyle changes. Here are the families of medications used to control cholesterol: Statins Cholesterol absorption inhibitors Resins Fibrates Niacin Statins Statins lower LDL-C and total cholesterol (on average, by as much as 60% and 40%, respectively), and raise HDL (on average, by as much as 10%).