Heart Attack or Stroke?
ScienceDaily (Jan. 25, 2012) — Will you have a heart attack or a stroke in your lifetime? Your odds may be worse than you think.
“We are giving incomplete and misleading risk information if we only focus on the next 10 years of someone’s life,” said principal investigator Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, chair and associate professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “With even just one risk factor, the likelihood is very large that someone will develop a major cardiovascular event that will kill them or substantially diminish their quality of life or health.”
Some key findings of the study:
Men who are 45 years old and have all risk factors at optimal levels have a 1.4 percent risk of having a heart attack or stroke or other form of death from heart disease while having two or more risk factors hike the risk to 49.5 percent.
For 45-year-old women with all risk factors being optimal, the chance of having a heart attack or stroke in their lifetimes is 4.1 percent while having two or more risk factors boost it to 30.7 percent.
“Just even one small increase in risk, from all optimal risk factors to one that isn’t optimal, like slightly elevated cholesterol or blood pressure, significantly bumps up a person’s lifetime risk,” Lloyd-Jones said. (Non-optimal means a person doesn’t have diabetes and doesn’t smoke but either cholesterol is 180 to 199 or blood pressure is 120 to 130 on top or 80 to 89 on the bottom. These numbers aren’t at levels that need to be treated with medication, but they are still higher than desired.)
Women have a higher risk than men for a stroke over their lifetimes but a lower risk for a heart attack.
African-Americans have higher risk factors such as more hypertension and diabetes than whites, but because they also tend to die at younger ages, their lifetime risk of having a heart attack or stroke ends up being the same as whites.“This study underscores the importance of lifestyle — particularly diet, exercise and smoking cessation — all the lifestyle patterns that are important in reducing the development of the risk factors in the first place,” said Jarett Berry, MD, who worked on the study when he was at Northwestern’s Feinberg School and is now assistant professor of medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
“We need to do a much better job of making sure these risk factors don’t develop in the first place, getting kids and young adults off to better starts so they don’t gain weight and are following healthier lifestyles throughout their lives,” Lloyd-Jones said.Lloyd-Jones pointed out that maintaining the full package of optimal risk factors through middle age had a dramatic effect on the remainder of a person’s life. “It appears that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” he said.
The research was supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
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