Lipid Research Clinics Program Reference Values for Hyperlipidemia and Hypolipidemia

Plasma cholesterol and triglyceride distributions have been established for 60,502 participants in a survey of ten separate, well-defined North American populations. Lipoprotein cholesterol levels were measured in a 7,055-person random sample of the white participants. From these data, new age- and sex-specific reference values have been selected for the diagnosis of hyperlipidemia and hypolipidemia. The use of these new reference values for population screening would result in the conditions of more young subjects being diagnosed as hypercholesterolemic and a very significant decrease in the proportion of the adult population being diagnosed as having hypertriglyceridemia.