Accuracy of 23 Equations for Estimating LDL Cholesterol in a Clinical Laboratory Database of 5,051,467 Patients.

Glob Heart

Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease, Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA.

Published: June 2023

Background: Alternatives to the Friedewald low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) equation have been proposed.

Objective: To compare the accuracy of available LDL-C equations with ultracentrifugation measurement.

Methods: We used the second harvest of the Very Large Database of Lipids (VLDbL), which is a population-representative convenience sample of adult and pediatric patients (N = 5,051,467) with clinical lipid measurements obtained via the vertical auto profile (VAP) ultracentrifugation method between October 1, 2015 and June 30, 2019. We performed a systematic literature review to identify available LDL-C equations and compared their accuracy according to guideline-based classification. We also compared the equations by their median error versus ultracentrifugation. We evaluated LDL-C equations overall and stratified by age, sex, fasting status, and triglyceride levels, as well as in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease, inflammation, and thyroid dysfunction.

Results: Analyzing 23 identified LDL-C equations in 5,051,467 patients (mean±SD age, 56±16 years; 53.3% women), the Martin/Hopkins equation most accurately classified LDL-C to the correct category (89.6%), followed by the Sampson (86.3%), Chen (84.4%), Puavilai (84.1%), Delong (83.3%), and Friedewald (83.2%) equations. The other 17 equations were less accurate than Friedewald, with accuracy as low as 35.1%. The median error of equations ranged from -10.8 to 18.7 mg/dL, and was best optimized using the Martin/Hopkins equation (0.3, IQR-1.6 to 2.4 mg/dL). The Martin/Hopkins equation had the highest accuracy after stratifying by age, sex, fasting status, triglyceride levels, and clinical subgroups. In addition, one in five patients who had Friedewald LDL-C <70 mg/dL, and almost half of the patients with Friedewald LDL-C <70 mg/dL and triglyceride levels 150-399 mg/dL, had LDL-C correctly reclassified to >70 mg/dL by the Martin/Hopkins equation.

Conclusions: Most proposed alternatives to the Friedewald equation worsen LDL-C accuracy, and their use could introduce unintended disparities in clinical care. The Martin/Hopkins equation demonstrated the highest LDL-C accuracy overall and across subgroups.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10289049PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gh.1214DOI Listing

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