This calculator will help you understand your risk of heart disease

PREVENT has made several important updates to its methodology to make its predictions more accurate and comprehensive.

Here are the key takeaways from the scientific statement released today:

• For the first time ever, heart failure was included as an outcome alongside heart attack and stroke.
• Another first-of-its-kind study includes both kidney disease and metabolic health as factors determining heart disease risk.
• PREVENT is calculated separately for men and women based on biological sex, so it is more accurate and reliable for women.
• Race was removed as a risk factor.

Dr. Sadiya Khan, professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at Northwestern University and lead author of the scientific statement, told Healthline that PREVENT’s goal is to “truly transform the prevention paradigm.” .

At the core of this new paradigm is a new health concept known as. Cardiovascular/kidney/metabolic syndrome (CKM). CKM is a more comprehensive and holistic view of the complex interactions of various organ systems within the human body, which can simultaneously influence each other and result in the development of a range of health problems. There is a gender.

Obesity, kidney disease, and heart disease are often diagnosed and treated independently. CKM helps shed light on these three components, not as independent health outcomes, but as interdependent and biologically related.that’s why Obesity is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular diseasethe risk of type 2 diabetes is also influenced by body weight, and patients with type 2 diabetes Twice as likely to develop cardiovascular disease.

“It’s really important to move away from thinking about treating someone’s diabetes as different from treating someone’s kidney disease or treating their heart disease and really think about treating someone’s heart disease risk as a whole person. It’s really important,” Khan said.

PREVENT is designed to provide doctors and patients with as accurate information as possible about the risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart failure. It’s been 10 years since AHA last updated its risk calculator in 2013.

This work”pooled cohort equation” – a formula that uses social and biological factors to determine risk over a period of time. In this case, PREVENT is designed to predict risk over two time periods: 10 years and 30 years.

It can also be used to determine the onset of CKM. The development of CKM is divided into four stages, ranging from no CKM risk (stage 1) to the simultaneous presence of some heart disease and CKM risk factors (stage 4).

“This important article goes beyond predicting heart attack and stroke and incorporates more recent research to obtain a more accurate risk estimation algorithm,” he said. Roger Blumenthal, director of the Johns Hopkins Heart Disease Prevention Center, told Healthline.

“So we can now more accurately estimate the absolute risk not only of heart attack and stroke, but also heart failure and kidney disease,” he said.

Blumenthal reviewed the AHA scientific statement before publication but was not a contributor.

A major change to the risk calculator is the decision to exclude race as a risk factor.Let me be clear: race is clear. association Development of heart disease and treatment results. However, the authors did not want race to be interpreted as a nonmodifiable biological risk factor. Doing so may result in race-specific treatment decisions by physicians.

“We don’t deny the fact that we know that certain racial and ethnic groups are at higher risk. For example, black Americans are at a much higher risk of developing heart disease and dying from heart disease. “The move to de-racialize is not about mitigating that greater risk, but actually prioritizing and focusing on the risk factors that lead to that increased risk,” Khan said. Ta.

If you want to learn more about your risk for heart disease, consider talking to your doctor. PREVENT is not intended for use by individuals on their own, but as part of a conversation with a healthcare provider.

“I think it’s really important that people understand that over 80% of cardiovascular events are preventable. And we want to do whatever we can to motivate people early on. “And with this document, we can now more accurately predict what the risks actually are for middle-aged people,” Blumenthal said.

Early prevention is key, he told Healthline.

If you don’t know what that means, learn about AHA. essential 8 A good place to start. These eight factors, which include fitness, cholesterol, weight, sleep, and more, are important and, more importantly, modifiable in maintaining heart health.

The American Heart Association has a new heart disease risk calculator known as PREVENT, which has been updated to include new risk factors such as kidney and metabolic disease.

PREVENT can estimate heart health risks for individuals over 30 years of age over 10-year and 30-year time periods.

Risk calculators should be used as tools for informed discussion between patients and physicians about risk and prevention.