What the fasting lipid profile means and what are your thoughts on it so the the screening for cholesterol is as we’ve already discussed it’s a a critical step in identifying people with elevated cholesterol who may require treatment for the Prevention of cardiovascular disease there’s so there’s been some debate whether it should be fasting or non fasting I think that food intake part of the test effects triglycerides more than any of the other species or types of cholesterol but I think that the standard as you mentioned is the the fasting lipid test and and we’ve been screening younger and younger people because we know that the sooner we identify this and diagnose it the more time we have to treat it and prevent disease that’s right and we’ll talk a little bit more about who gets screened in a little bit but certainly we are doing a lot of different tests to look for these risk factors another test that patients will often ask us about in primary care is something called an advanced lipid test dr. del Conde can you tell us a little bit about that so with the explosion and knowledge about cholesterol there has been the development of a number of different very sophisticated tests that not only mention the test at Yuma that you already listed LDL HDL triglycerides total cholesterol but they actually go into the the different subtypes of LDL particles so their size they’re stratified according to their density their size their numbers and it gets very very sophisticated but I’ll tell you that even within the cardiovascular community there’s a little bit of debate on the value of these tests I know that many of my colleagues still send these tests and base some of their decisions on these results but not all cardiovascular specialists do and and I think that if you look at the guidelines not only the the guidelines that we use here in the United States promoted by the American Heart Association but if you look at the European guidelines at you will see that that they also just favor the basic test that you mentioned LDL HDL triglycerides total cholesterol simple easy test today