Familial hypercholesterolemia disorder in two generations simultaneously." "The use of total cholesterol alone may best discriminate between people with and without FH between the ages of 1 to 9 years." Screening of toddlers has been suggested, and results of a trial on 10,000 one-year-olds were published in 2016. Work was needed to find whether screening was cost-effective, and acceptable to families. FH is usually treated with statins. Statins act by inhibiting the enzyme hydroxymethylglutaryl CoA reductase (HMG-CoA-reductase) in the liver. In response, the liver produces more LDL receptors, which remove circulating LDL from the blood. Statins effectively lower cholesterol and LDL levels,
Lovastatin the β-hydroxy acid open ring form; which is the active form. Lovastatin and other statins have been studied for their chemopreventive and chemotherapeutic effects. No such effects were seen in the early studies. More recent investigations revealed some chemopreventive and therapeutic effects, for certain types of cancer, especially in combination of statins with other anticancer drugs. It is likely that these effect are mediated by the properties of statins to reduce proteasome activity, leading to an accumulation of cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors p21 and p27, and to subsequent G-phase arrest, as seen in cells of different cancer lines. Compactin and lovastatin,