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Study: Fasting not necessary before cholesterol testing

Category: Heart Health and Cholesterol

Cholesterol testing can play an important role in monitoring overall health, but for many people, the required fasting before the test can be difficult.

Some tests can require patients to fast for up to 12 hours beforehand, but new research is suggesting this may not be necessary.

According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, there is no correlation between fasting and good test results.

Researcher John Danesh said in the report that "this finding suggests that current discussions about whether to measure cholesterol levels or apolipoproteins in vascular risk assessment should hinge more on practical considerations."

The study found that testing yielded the same quality of results, whether the patient fasted or not.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention ranks heart disease as the number one killer in the United States.