Child cholesterol screening urged

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All youngsters aged around 15 months should be screened while having their vaccinations to identify a condition that could lead to early death.

Testing could pinpoint high cholesterol that runs in families - known as familial hypercholesterolaemia - meaning parents could also be identified, experts said.

Affected adults could be given cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins, with their child given them when they were older, they said.

Familial hypercholesterolaemia affects about one in every 500 people and causes very high levels of low density lipoprotein (LDL) or "bad cholesterol" in the blood.

People with a family history of the condition have a high risk of dying from coronary heart disease although taking statins lowers this risk substantially.

Adults aged 20 to 39 have a risk of dying from coronary heart disease that is 100 times more than that of people without the condition.

The research, released ahead of being published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), examined 13 studies involving 1,907 people with a family condition, and more than 16,000 people acting as controls. If children were screened between the ages of one and nine, detection rates for the family condition were an estimated 88%, the research showed.

Follow-up blood screening on the parents of a child with the condition could also identify the affected parent 96% of the time. The team who carried out the study, from Barts and The London, Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry, proposed testing children aged about 15 months - when they usually have their measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab.

Dr David Wald, a cardiologist and senior lecturer at the school, said he believed parents would find the test acceptable.