Regardless of the excessive hopes for the brand new assessments, there are numerous questions.

Some critics say {that a} concentrate on treating youthful folks is misplaced as a result of they might not adjust to taking a statin or one other drug for the remainder of their lives. It may be troublesome for younger folks to concentrate on potential threats to their well being a long time sooner or later, and a few of Dr. Rader’s sufferers have delay even getting polygenic danger assessments after he recommends them.

The true want, these critics say, is with the massive group of older individuals who want cholesterol-lowering remedy however should not getting it, or who’re abandoning their prescriptions. In a single examine, about 40 p.c of individuals 65 and older who had a coronary heart assault and want lipid-lowering medicines for the remainder of their lives inside two years.

Others, like Dr. Rita F. Redberg, a heart specialist on the College of California, San Francisco, the editor at JAMA Inside Medication and a critic of the overuse of statins, is anxious that polygenic danger scores might introduce new issues.

“There’s a variety of draw back to labeling folks with a illness,” she mentioned.

The label, she added, “inexorably results in assessments and a seek for therapies.” And, she mentioned, “as a result of the individual, who now has change into a ‘affected person,’ is asymptomatic, extra assessments and potential therapies generally won’t make the individual really feel any higher.”

Folks can go from considering of themselves as wholesome to considering of themselves as somebody with a illness. “Now, every time they expertise the frequent aches, pains and twinges of life, they surprise whether it is as a result of they’ve this ‘illness,’” Dr. Redberg mentioned. “They usually might then go to the physician and even emergency room for issues they’d not have beforehand. And that additionally will result in extra assessments and procedures, with their attendant danger of harms.”