It will help more women get the help they need sooner, cardiologists say.
February 14, 2007 (Press Release) --
Women may soon have a better idea of what their actual cardiovascular disease risk is for the next 10 years and beyond.
That's because researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston have developed a new cardiovascular disease assessment tool specifically for female patients.
The new risk model, called the Reynolds Risk Score, includes family history and blood levels of highly sensitive C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation), in addition to more traditional risk factors.
"The Reynolds Risk Score provides a very easy way for women and physicians to truly understand what the cardiovascular risk is, not only for 10 years, but for 20 and 30 years," explained the study's lead author, Dr. Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Of the approximately 10 million American women who have an intermediate risk of heart disease based on current guidelines, about 50 percent would be classified into higher or lower categories [based on the Reynolds Risk Score]."
Results of the study are in the Feb. 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Heart disease remains the leading killer of American women. "Women need to understand that their risk of suffering a heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular disease is the same as it is for men, but it happens about 10 years later. While preventing breast and ovarian cancer is important, preventing heart disease has to take a higher place," said Ridker.
But, he said, the current guidelines, originally designed in the 1950s and 1960s, don't fully capture a woman's heart disease risk. In fact, as many as 20 percent of all women who have had heart attacks don't have any of the known major risk factors, and, according to Ridker, about half of all heart attacks occur in women who have normal cholesterol levels.
To develop a better model of female risk, Ridker and his colleagues assessed 35 different risk factors in nearly 25,000 women taking part in the Women's Health Study. All of the women were over 45 years old and heart disease-free at the start of the study. Additionally, none of the women included in the risk-core study had diabetes, because being diabetic automatically puts a woman in the high-risk category for heart disease.
The average follow-up time was 10.2 years.
The researchers used information from two-thirds of the group to design the new risk model and the other third to validate the Reynolds Risk Score.
The Reynolds Risk Score includes age, systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure reading), total and HDL or "bad" cholesterol levels, smoking status, levels of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP) and family history of cardiovascular trouble (whether or not a parent had a heart attack before the age of 60).
source: http://health.yahoo.com/
That's because researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston have developed a new cardiovascular disease assessment tool specifically for female patients.
The new risk model, called the Reynolds Risk Score, includes family history and blood levels of highly sensitive C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation), in addition to more traditional risk factors.
"The Reynolds Risk Score provides a very easy way for women and physicians to truly understand what the cardiovascular risk is, not only for 10 years, but for 20 and 30 years," explained the study's lead author, Dr. Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Of the approximately 10 million American women who have an intermediate risk of heart disease based on current guidelines, about 50 percent would be classified into higher or lower categories [based on the Reynolds Risk Score]."
Results of the study are in the Feb. 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Heart disease remains the leading killer of American women. "Women need to understand that their risk of suffering a heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular disease is the same as it is for men, but it happens about 10 years later. While preventing breast and ovarian cancer is important, preventing heart disease has to take a higher place," said Ridker.
But, he said, the current guidelines, originally designed in the 1950s and 1960s, don't fully capture a woman's heart disease risk. In fact, as many as 20 percent of all women who have had heart attacks don't have any of the known major risk factors, and, according to Ridker, about half of all heart attacks occur in women who have normal cholesterol levels.
To develop a better model of female risk, Ridker and his colleagues assessed 35 different risk factors in nearly 25,000 women taking part in the Women's Health Study. All of the women were over 45 years old and heart disease-free at the start of the study. Additionally, none of the women included in the risk-core study had diabetes, because being diabetic automatically puts a woman in the high-risk category for heart disease.
The average follow-up time was 10.2 years.
The researchers used information from two-thirds of the group to design the new risk model and the other third to validate the Reynolds Risk Score.
The Reynolds Risk Score includes age, systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure reading), total and HDL or "bad" cholesterol levels, smoking status, levels of high sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP) and family history of cardiovascular trouble (whether or not a parent had a heart attack before the age of 60).
source: http://health.yahoo.com/
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