What is Your Heart Attack Risk?

A recent study looks at the various factors that determine a heart attack risk.

Various environmental and genetic contributors can put certain individuals at a greater risk for a heart attack. For instance, according to study author Subhagata Chattopadhyay of the Camellia Institute of Engineering in Kolkata, he confirms that being male and between the ages of 48 and 60 years of age can put someone at a greater risk for a heart attack. Being female and over the age of 50 can also increase the risk when looking at certain factors.

The study notes the following, via a press release: "The use of computational data mining techniques that allow researchers to extract interesting and meaningful information from real-life clinical data could remove at least some aspect of the subjectivity of clinical prognosis and allow the epidemiology to work at the patient level more precisely. There have been data mining approaches tried before. However, they often have inherent problems in that the classification of the data for information retrieval is based on decision making learnt from examples set by doctors and so they incorporate the very subjectivity that Chattopadhyay hopes to avoid with his approach."

The authors looked at over 300 real-world patient cases in order to study various levels of cardiac arrest, ranging from mild to severe. Other factors were considered, including age, gender, alcohol abuse, cholesterol level, smoking (active and passive), physical inactivity, obesity, diabetes, family history, and prior cardiac event. The risk factors were determined based on several aspects, according to the study.

"The essence of this work essentially lies in the introduction of clustering techniques instead of purely statistical modeling, where the latter has its own limitations in 'data-model fitting' compared to the former that is more flexible," Chattopadhyay explained, via the release. "The reliability of the data used, should be checked, and this has been done in this work to increase its authenticity. I reviewed several papers on epidemiological research, where I'm yet to see these methodologies, used."

More information regarding the study can be found via the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology.