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For information on how to use the Fitech Framingham Calculator, please follow this link.
The Framingham Scale determines the likelihood, as a percentage, of you contracting Coronoray Heart Disease within the following ten year period.
Heart Attack/Coronary Heart Disease Risk Assessment
By age 20, you should know your risk factors. The important risk factors you can control or treat include:
- smoking
- high blood pressure
- high blood cholesterol
- diabetes
- being overweight or obese
- physical inactivity
What is the Framingham Heart Study?
The Framingham Heart Study is one of the most important public health studies in American medical history. The study's goal is to learn why people get cardiovascular disease, and how it evolves and results in death in the general population. This information will help researchers find out, over a long time, how those who develop cardiovascular diseases differ from those who don't. Visit http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/framingham/ if you want to know more about the study.
The Framingham study is continuing to identify additional factors that may predict the probability of heart disease. Among these factors are genetic markers, measures of blood lipids other than cholesterol and measures of clot-promoting substances in the blood. While the predictive value of these factors has not yet been clearly established, researchers have been able to quantify the impact of well-known risks such as smoking and blood pressure and develop risk-assessment equations that calculate an individual's probability of developing heart disease in five or 10 years.
Established Risk Factors
Heredity, male sex and age are immutable characteristics that increase the risk of heart disease. Heart disease, particularly the type that manifests itself before the age of 55, tends to run in families, so anyone with a family history of early cardiovascular disease should be especially careful to control the modifiable risk factors. Race is also important; the rate of moderate hypertension is twice as high in Afro-Caribbeans as in caucasian, and Afro-Caribbeans' rate of severe hypertension is three times greater than that of caucasian.
Until they reach middle age, men have a far greater risk of heart disease than women. After menopause, however, women lose the protective effect of the hormone estrogen and quickly catch up to men in their rates of atherosclerosis, heart attack and stroke. Increasing age, in and of itself, is also an important risk factor for both sexes, since the incidence of heart disease rises with age.
