Letter from the NLA President: Charging Ahead

Hello NLA members, I hope everyone had a wonderful summer. As our long, warm days move into cool fall nights, the NLA continues to charge ahead, expanding educational opportunities for providers to combat the rise of cardiovascular disease. 

The fall CLU in Scottsdale, Arizona, will go off without a hitch. We have a fantastic line up of faculty and we greatly appreciate their participation. “Talking lipids” with my longtime friends and befriending so many new lipid colleagues is my favorite part of our meetings. Though the in-person meetings for 2023 will have concluded, the NLA is going to provide the online Foundations and Masters courses online this winter. To register, visit: lipid.org/education. Be sure to catch them before the Educational Activity Task Force revises these courses in 2024. 

Furthermore, the NLA is partnering with the National Forum for Heart Disease & Stroke Prevention to review current and past LDL-C quality metrics and working towards restoring improved measures to meaningfully improve LDL-C measurement and patient care. This is a long-term project. We are anxious to see the final product of this project, but it will require input from many different interested partners so look for future emails with specific requests for our members. This task is critical, and it will benefit our patients immensely. 

In other news, in late 2021 and again in early 2023, the National Lipid Association (NLA) provided commentary expressing concern with the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently published Final Recommendation Statement: Screening for Lipid Disorders in Children and Adolescents. The NLA wrote USPSTF our concerns and observations about the statement. The NLA feels the statement was self-evident, unnecessary, and potentially harmful to the population because the bottom line interferes with the ability to identify at-risk individuals and inhibit the ability to prevent disease effectively in vulnerable patients. 

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season, and don’t forget to add paying your NLA dues to your “to-do” list! Statements will roll out in November, but you can visit lipid.org/dues/payment to get this important task checked off early. 

We will not be together again until June 2024 in Las Vegas, NV. However, look for future messages with activities and ways to engage with the NLA and your lipid “peeps” online. 

See you in 2024!