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Berlin The Chairman of the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA), Josef Hecken, criticizes the plans of Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) to combat cardiovascular diseases.
More drugs and testing for children is activism, not a strategy to control the disease of civilization, Hecken told the newspaper. Editorial network Germany (RND).
Lauterbach’s draft for a healthy heart law stipulates that children, young people and adults must undergo regular heart examinations in future in order to detect and prevent lipid metabolism disorders.
Screenings in childhood and adolescence should provide early indications of the existence of hereditary causes of lipid metabolism disorders. Medications to stop smoking and to lower cholesterol levels should also be prescribed more frequently. In Hecken’s view, the plans are going in the wrong direction.
Instead of working to ensure that children have a healthy, balanced diet and educational campaigns about a healthy lifestyle, they should be prescribed medication, he complained.
Lauterbach’s preferred cholesterol-lowering medications aren’t the mints from the supermarket, but rather medications with many interactions and side effects. For example, they’ve caused muscle pain, liver damage or diabetes.
Hecken said that under such an approach, lifelong medication would begin in adolescence. The approach of consistently giving children medication should remain the absolute exception if nothing else works for medical reasons. Under the bill, the services would be funded by health insurance companies.
In the official opinion The impartial members of the G-BA on the Healthy Heart Act state that it is technically questionable whether the measures set out in the submitted bill can actually achieve the intended purpose because they not only completely ignore the extremely important primary prevention, but also even counter-finance additional costs for diagnostics and medication, secondary preventives, with already scarce funds to promote primary prevention.
Approaches that focused exclusively on the statutory health insurance benefits law ran counter to the real goal of improving individual health literacy and ensuring living conditions that were as health-promoting as possible, Hecken warned in an accompanying message.
Furthermore, the services would be introduced without their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness being tested in a systematic and transparent process. The G-BA President stressed that this would prejudge the results of the testing processes already underway at the G-BA – this applies both to the early detection of familial lipid metabolism disorders in children and to the use of statins.
Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in Germany and, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) about 40 percent of all deaths, about 350,000 per year.
The Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) justifies the need for the law, among other things, with the lowest life expectancy compared to other Western European countries and, at the same time, with a deficit in prevention and early detection. © afp/aha/aerzteblatt.de