New tool predicts heart attack risk in any country
Globorisk online resource has the potential to dramatically reduce the world's cardiovascular toll
Over the age of 40? Want to know your risk of suffering a fatal heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years? Then read on.
A new instrument dubbed Globorisk, unveiled yesterday, will allow you to determine your risk simply by inputting your age, gender, blood pressure and cholesterol numbers, whether you have diabetes or smoke, and which country you live in, its developers say.
It is hoped such levels of self-scrutiny can spark important lifestyle changes among those at risk, said Globorisk's creators, as well as identifying people who may gain benefits from preventive drug treatments.
"A risk of about 4 or 5 per cent on the chart for fatal cardiovascular disease starts becoming high," said lead author Goodarz Danaei of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and risks greater than 10 per cent should "definitely be taken seriously".
The research was published in the medical journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, with eight ready-made charts for people in China, Denmark, England, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain and the United States.
For the first time, the method used to create the tables can be recalibrated for any country in the world using readily-available national health statistics, said researcher Danaei.
Globorisk, which used data from eight other large, long-term studies with over 50,000 participants in total, is meant to have charts for all the world's nations "in a few months".