Heart Disease Risk Begins With Middle-Age Risk Factors

Guess who is more likely to have middle-age risk factors for heart disease - fat people or intended-size people.

A meta-analysis of 18 studies confirms that differences in risk-factor burdens in middle age translate into significant differences in lifetime cardiovascular disease risk [1].

"The current paradigm when we're thinking of prevention is to assess risk over the next 10 years using something like the Framingham risk score . . . and that's supposed to guide decision making," senior author Dr Donald Lloyd-Jones (Northwestern University, Chicago, IL) told heartwire . "That's a perfectly valid approach, but that's an incomplete way to represent risk to our patients."

The new results from the Cardiovascular Lifetime Risk Pooling Project, published in the January 26, 2012 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, show that risk in people in their 40s or 50s with one or two risk factors such as hypertension or high cholesterol ramps up sharply over their lifetime. "So there's a disconnect between the short-term risk information that we routinely calculate and what we know, especially with this paper, are long-term risks that are dramatically higher.

Get fit and get rid of your risk factors.