What's Your Heart Disease Risk?

High cholesterol, lifestyle choices, and other factors increase heart attack risk. Find out if you're likely to have a heart attack within the next 10 years.

Even though you don’t have a time machine, you do have the ability to calculate your 10-year heart illness risk. Decades of research have shown how heart illness risk factors such as high cholesterol & lifestyle choices like smoking cigarettes add up.

The National Cholesterol schooling Program (NCEP) has published a set of guidelines that is intended to help patients & doctors exactly predict heart illness risk. The greater your risk for heart illness within 10 years, the more aggressive you need to be with prevention. For example, the guidelines note that individuals who already have coronary heart illness or an equivalent health condition, such as diabetes, have a more than 20 percent risk of a heart event within 10 years. Add other risk factors, such as high cholesterol, advanced age, cigarette smoking, & a relatives history of early heart illness, & your total risk notches up.

The NCEP guidelines include charts that enable you to calculate a very specific risk score, based on your risk factors, age, & gender. For example, a 57-year-old bloke could use the charts to find out that they gets 7 points for age, 5 points for cholesterol over 280, 3 points for smoking cigarettes, & 1 point for his slightly high but treated hypertension. Adding all of them together, they has 16 points, or a 25 percent risk of a heart illness event within ten years.

The same approach is applied to diet — using the diet appendix in the guidelines, you can give yourself points for the categories of foods you eat regularly to find out whether you are eating a heart-healthy diet.

“We need to match the intensity of treatment that they recommend to any patient with that patient’s level of risk,” says Daniel Levy, MD, director of the Framingham Heart Study & professor of medicine at Boston University in Boston. This is because the changes you may must make all have some degree of risk & burden attached to them.

four times you have a lovely idea of your heart illness risk, you can make an informed decision about the steps you need to take to reduce that risk.