New medical guidelines aim to head off damage early with lifestyle changes, screening tests and medication.
3 min
Adults should be screened and treated for high cholesterol starting at age 30, if not sooner, according to new clinical guidelines, lowering the age by at least a decade at a time when heart attacks are becoming more common in younger adults.
The goal is to shift to a more proactive approach to head off problems in younger years, rather than starting lifestyle changes and medical treatment in middle age when a patient may already have damage in their arteries, said Dr Roger Blumenthal, chair of the committee of cardiologists that wrote the new guidelines.
Growing research shows how much damage can be done when levels of LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol stay high in the blood for years, he said.
At the same time, more medicines have become available to lower cholesterol, along with screening tests and a new online tool that allows people 30 and older to calculate their risk of cardiovascular disease.
“We need to pay attention much earlier,” said Blumenthal, director of preventive cardiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
The guidelines, published Friday in two leading cardiology journals, were issued by 11 medical associations, including the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association.
These organisations set standards for medical professionals from family doctors to cardiologists.
Approximately 25% of U.S. adults—and 20% of adolescents—have high LDL cholesterol.
For adults, especially, that increases their risk of heart attacks and strokes because it causes plaque-forming particles to build up in their arteries over time, hardening and narrowing them.
Doctors are being urged to counsel children and adolescents on diet and exercise, avoiding tobacco and other healthy lifestyle habits.
More young people are being diagnosed with diabetes and other conditions that put them at higher risk of cardiovascular events.
“If we want to talk about eliminating heart disease and heart attacks, treating cholesterol is one of the most important things,” said Dr Sadiya Khan, professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She wasn’t involved in writing the recommendations.
The new guidelines offer a number of different ways doctors can determine whether a person’s at risk.
Everyone should get a blood test once to measure their levels of lipoprotein(a), another type of “bad” cholesterol linked to heart disease.
Researchers say Lp(a), which is genetic, significantly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, and a test can identify risks for people who are otherwise healthy.
Testing for another protein, apolipoprotein B, can also be performed for those with high triglycerides, diabetes or other conditions, the guidelines say.
Research suggests it is a better predictor of heart disease risk than LDL cholesterol. undefined undefined Men aged 40 and older and women aged 45 and older with a borderline risk of heart attack or stroke may also get a coronary artery calcium scan to check for plaque buildup in arterial walls.
Children should be screened for cholesterol and other lipids once between ages 9 and 11, backing an existing recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
As part of the new guidelines, young adults should be screened beginning at age 19 and every five years after that.
People should be screened for their risk of cardiovascular disease starting at age 30, using an AHA online calculator called
Prevent that measures risk based on a person’s cholesterol, blood pressure, and other indicators. Screening was previously recommended beginning at age 40, using a different tool.
Young adults should be offered cholesterol-lowering medications if their LDL cholesterol is 160 milligrams per deciliter, according to the guidelines.
The same is true if they have a family history of atherosclerotic disease at an early age or a high risk of developing it over the next three decades as measured by the Prevent calculator.
Adults with genetically high cholesterol should also be put on medication. undefined undefined
While the end result of additional screening may mean more people end up on cholesterol-lowering drugs, younger people may be able to avoid high doses.
“If you identify someone at risk earlier in life, you may not need to treat them with as intensive a statin regimen because you have time on your side,” said Dr Steven Nissen, a preventive cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who wasn’t involved in writing the new guidelines.
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Rugged coastal drives and fireside drams define a slow, indulgent journey through Scotland’s far north.
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.
4 min
Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.
So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.
“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.
“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.
After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.
The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.
But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.
They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.
Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.
“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.
“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”
“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”
Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.
When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.
The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.
It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.
He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.
In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.
About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.
In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.
About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.
Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.
“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.
Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.
Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.
So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.
When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.
“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.
It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.
Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.
“The opposite of AI,” she said.
Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.
“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.
Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.
His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.
Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.
“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.
“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”
