Following last month’s surprising announcement that the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute would no longer issue guidelines, leaders of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology have now announced that are “officially assuming the joint governance, management and public distribution” of the enormously influential cardiovascular prevention guidelines, including the much-delayed and much-anticipated hypertension and cholesterol guidelines (formerly known as JNC 8 and ATP IV). The ACC and AHA will also assume responsibility for guidelines on cardiovascular risk assessment, cardiovascular lifestyle interventions and obesity.
In an editorial published in Circulation and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, leaders of the NHLBI, AHA, and ACC provide a little more information on how the new model will work. One important announcement, that “all chairs and members of the current writing panels have been invited to continue to work together with the ACC and AHA to finalize the guidelines,” might indicate that the hypertension and cholesterol guidelines could see the light of day in the not-too-far-distant future. In June the NHLBI’s Michael Lauer expressed confidence that these guidelines would appear in less than a year, but the AHA said that no timeline had yet been established.
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