Lipids and cardiovascular risk

About

Our lipid and cardiovascular risk clinic is a one-stop centre for genetic diagnosis and management of lipid disorders. We offer world class research facilities and access to new medications. The clinic is based at Hammersmith Hospital and supported by the clinical diabetes and endocrine service at Hammersmith and St Mary’s hospitals.

Our clinic supports people with raised blood fats, such as cholesterol (familial hypercholesterolaemia) and triglycerides, which are associated with a high risk of cardiovascular disease, and patients who cannot tolerate usual medications. Our team works with at-risk patients to diagnose medical conditions, measure and monitor levels of lipids (blood fats), provide cardiovascular risk assessments and find suitable treatments to lower the levels of lipids in their blood. Genetic diagnosis of clinical presentations is also available along with advanced imaging to detect early onset diseases of the blood vessels.

In addition to medical management, patients have access to a dedicated dietician. We also provide a specific children’s service, which occurs quarterly in the paediatric outpatients department at Hammersmith Hospital. This clinic is run jointly with a lipid clinician and a consultant paediatrician.

St Mary’s Hospital provides the largest clinical diabetes and endocrine service in north west London. It operates from a purpose built one-stop diabetes and endocrine centre that accommodates a retinal screening centre, an endocrine investigations unit and consultation rooms for the multidisciplinary team.

 

Conditions and treatments

We treat a variety of conditions including:

• patients who are intolerant of first-line lipid-lowering treatment, usually statins
• patients who do not achieve target lipid levels with first-line lipid-lowering treatment and in most cases will require a second-line lipid-lowering agent, even third and fourth to get patients to acceptable cholesterol levels. These include therapies such as PCSK9 inhibitor injections
• patients with inherited lipid disorders: We treat raised blood lipids with a combination of dietary care, regular exercise and lipid lowering medications. We offer lipoprotein apheresis on a weekly or bi-weekly treatment protocol for patients affected by homozygous familial hypercholesterolaemia. 

We also offer the following investigations:

• baseline blood tests such as full blood count, renal and liver biochemistry, glucose, HbA1c and lipid profile
• more specialist lipid testing such as apolipoproteins (A&B) and lipoprotein (a)
• Apo E genotyping and DNA analysis for familial hypercholesterolaemia at an accredited genetics laboratory

Additional information

Education

We have training facilities for specialist registrars interested in lipidology and for students in the MSc in preventive cardiology programme at Imperial College London.

Further online resources

• British Heart Foundation
• Heart UK