Heart disease is the leading cause of death in our country. Look into preventive medicine this new year.
Preventive medicine can be messy. In a perfect world, we’d put helmets only on motorcyclists who we knew were going to crash. And we’d only do mammograms on women we knew were going to get breast cancer. But things are hardly perfect, and when it comes to heart disease — the leading cause of death in our country — early treatment of risk factors is particularly important.
Although heart attacks arrive acutely and often without warning, the disease process leading up to it is generally a much slower and chronic one. On an anatomical level, a heart attack is caused by an arterial blockage that starves the heart muscle of blood flow and oxygen.
These tools use various atherosclerotic risk factors to calculate the likelihood that an individual will have a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years. It is a probability, not a certainty. Low risk is less than 5%; borderline is 5% to 7.5%; intermediate is 7.5% to 20% and high risk is greater than 20%.
“It’s, basically, the only test we have that trumps age in terms of its ability to predict cardiovascular mortality,” Miedema says. “And interestingly, it’s quite predictive of all-cause mortality as well, primarily because of what are called ‘shared risk factors’— things like smoking that not only increase cardiovascular mortality but also increase cancer mortality.”
Also read: One simple way to reduce high blood pressure — along with the risk of heart attacks, cardiovascular disease and strokes
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