Cardiovascular health calculator4/7/2023 In addition to patient safety, risk overestimation has important public health and economic ramifications, the investigators say. “The take-home message here is that as important as guidelines are, they are just a blueprint, a starting point for a conversation between patient and physician about the risks and benefits of different treatments or preventive strategies,” Blaha adds. “Our results reveal a lack of predictive accuracy in risk calculators and highlight an urgent need to reexamine and fine-tune our existing risk assessment techniques,” says senior investigator Michael Blaha, M.D., M.P.H., director of clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease. The results of the study, the research team says, underscore the perils of overreliance on standardized algorithms and highlight the importance of individualized risk assessment that includes additional variables, such as other medical conditions, family history of early heart disease, level of physical activity, and the presence and amount of calcium buildup in the heart’s vessels. 17 in Annals of Internal Medicine, suggest four out of five widely used clinical calculators considerably overrate risk, including the most recent one unveiled in 2013 by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology amid controversy about its predictive accuracy. These algorithms calculate heart attack probability using a combination of factors, such as gender, age, smoking history, cholesterol levels, blood pressure and diabetes, among others. ![]() ![]() Physicians commonly use standardized risk assessment systems, or algorithms, to decide whether someone needs care with daily aspirin and cholesterol-lowering drugs or just watchful waiting and follow-up exams. Most “risk calculators” used by clinicians to gauge a patient’s chances of suffering a heart attack and guide treatment decisions appear to significantly overestimate the likelihood of a heart attack, according to results of a study by investigators at Johns Hopkins and other institutions.
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