Based mostly on his work, CRP was added to guidelines as a tiebreaker test.

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The connection between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease is by now so well established that inflammatory markers like CRP, while they may prove useful to test and treat, will not take the place of cholesterol any time soon, says Alan Daugherty, PhD, the director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Kentucky.

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He picked CRP because it was the easiest measure to use to test for inflammation.

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The experiment was designed to test whether people who had normal levels of bad cholesterol but high CRP could be helped by statin therapy.

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