New Device Helps Calculate Heart Disease Risk

A new device may be able to help calculate heart disease, according to recent findings published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) have created a calculator that can actually access people's 20-year risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

"Currently recommended risk models for CVD are harder for an individual to calculate on their own because they include clinical risk factors such as elevated cholesterol and blood pressure. These risk scores, which are mostly used in doctors' offices, often underestimate the burden of CVD among middle-aged adults, and women in particular," said Stephanie Chiuve, a research associate in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH and assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, in a news release. 

Researchers based the calculator off of medical records on 61,025 women from the Nurses' Health study and 34,478 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. None of the participants had suffered from a chronic illness in 1986 and were tracked for up to 24 years. Throughout this time, there were 3,775 cases and 3,506 cases of CVD diagnosed in women and men, including nonfatal myocardial infraction (heart attack) ischemic stroke and fatal coronary heart disease.

The team specifically identified nine important diet and lifestyle variables that contributed to CVD-risk. Furthermore, people were asked a series of questions and assessed on one of three levels, including low, moderate and high.

"This tool represents the first time that data from large-scale, well-conducted studies were used to develop an easy-to-use CVD prevention tool," concluded Eric Rimm, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at HSPH and senior author of the study.