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The National Lipid Association (NLA), in collaboration with the American Society for Preventive Cardiology (ASPC), has released a Joint Expert Clinical Consensus providing new guidance on the recognition and management of persistent chylomicronemia — a severe and often misunderstood form of hypertriglyceridemia. The full paper is now published in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology and available here.

Extreme hypertriglyceridemia, defined as triglyceride (TG) levels ≥1000 mg/dL, is almost always indicative of chylomicronemia. The current diagnostic approach categorizes individuals with chylomicronemia into familial chylomicronemia syndrome (FCS; prevalence 1–10 per million), caused by the biallelic combination of pathogenic variants that impair the lipolytic action of lipoprotein lipase (LPL), or multifactorial chylomicronemia syndrome (MCS, 1 in 500). A pragmatic framework should emphasize the severity of the phenotype and the risk of complications.