Screening babies for cholesterol has no scientific basis

Implications:  Hypercholesterolemia has an established link with a risk of cardiac events and there has been a push to screen high risk population for early intervention in an effort to reduce the incidence of heart attacks and strokes, for example. However to suggest any benefit from screening babies is to misunderstand the science and is immediately suspect in my view. Such a measure if adopted would increase healthcare costs and cause undue worry for parents, with no corresponding ability to mitigate the risk they are now told exists.

Analysis: First this is a meta-analysis of several studies and does not carry the same weight as a well constructed scientific study. There has been an ever increasing number of neonatal screening tests based on the fact that there is some corresponding identified intervention that can be done.  Whether it's for thyroid disease, PKU, sickle cell or any other neonatal screen; the information is always used to do something useful and to mitigate any likely sequelae.

In this case, testing babies at 15 months would at best indicate a familial tendency for hypercholesterolemia. The pattern of inheritance is autosomal recessive, so both parents would then have to be tested and the one with the high cholesterol (presuming there is one) would be the "culprit". What then? If the concern is high cholesterol, why not screen the parents directly rather than use the child as a surrogate? What treatment would the child undergo? There are no studies I could find in which children younger than 13 were routinely place don statins. As for diet; well ALL kids should be taught to have  healthy diet anyway.