, reducing all-cause mortality, CV mortality and events) but with greater absolute benefits in patients at baseline higher risk.[37] For CV mortality over the 2 to 6 year treatment period of the trials, the NNT was 233; for all-cause mortality over 1 to 6 years, the NNT was 250; and for fatal and non-fatal MI over 2 to 6 years, the NNT was 123. Dedicated studies [38,39] and subgroup analyses show the benefit of statins for primary prevention does not vary with gender, age, race, baseline lipid levels, presence of DM, CKD, or hypertension.[37] Determining the cardiac risk cutoff to recommend statin treatment is a simplified strategy to most closely resemble the risk profiles of those included in the trials which demonstrated reduction in CV risk. While no studies used CV risk scores as part of the inclusion criteria, the studied populations had a high prevalence of CV risk factors, and some studies showed an increasing absolute benefit of statins with increased baseline CV risk. The 12% threshold we chose most closely resembles the lower limit of risk of populations in the clinical trials for which the benefits clearly outweighed the risks. The major primary prevention trials showed an event rate between 6 7.5%. Since these trials lasted 2 to 6 years (roughly equivalent to 12 15% ten-year event rate), the Work Group chose a 12% ten-year risk threshold to match the available data. There are no clinical trials that specifically address the <6% risk category, which would be represented by a control group event rate of approximately 3%. Using the same methodology, only two trials included patients with risks between 6 12%, although these trials did include nearly 30,000 patients.