Becoming educated about your own cardiovascular risk is pivotal to prevention, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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The most important person in reducing your risk for cardiovascular disease is you, and managing your blood cholesterol levels is just one part of an overall, lifelong strategy, beginning with becoming educated about your own unique set of risk factors. That’s according to Roger Blumenthal, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins and chair of an American College of Cardiology committee that has just rewritten cholesterol management guidelines.

Blumenthal: I think so much comes down to education and we want people to try to estimate their own risk and to look at what we call the risk enhancers. Things like a family history of early heart disease, high risk ethnicities such as being South Asian or Filipino, having persistently high triglycerides or high LDL, inflammatory arthritis, lupus. Our hope is that as we disseminate these guidelines people will be more educated consumers, helpful to the clinician.      :28

Blumenthal says the good news is the majority of risk factors are modifiable, and they are in the hands of the individual to make informed choices. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.