December 15, 2016 – Risk Tool

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Anchor lead:  Can a new heart disease risk tool help motivate people better? Elizabeth Tracey reports

What’s your risk of having a heart attack or stroke in the next ten years? That’s been a calculation many risk assessment tools have made, but now a new one endorsed by the American Heart Association has been unveiled.  Redonda Miller, president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, explains.

Miller: It starts with a baseline entry of data about an individual patient.  What are the variables that are most important? Gender, age, race, cholesterol parameters.  Then the tool will spit out a 10 year risk.  That’s not that novel. But what’s really nice is you can take this information and the risk for your patient, start therapy and then go back a year later, plug in the parameters and the tool will allow you to see the risk reduction that you have accomplished.  :32

Miller believes people will respond to information on how changes like smoking cessation or taking a statin can reduce their risk.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.