June 3, 2019 – Health Assessment

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Anchor lead: How accurate is how you assess your own health? Elizabeth Tracey reports

People who rate their own health as excellent may still be at significant risk for cardiovascular events, including heart attack and stroke, a new study by Olusola Orimoloye, a cardiologist and postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues has shown.

Orimoloye: Even if you perceive yourself to be in excellent health we found that at least 10% of people who self-reported excellent health in the MESA study had extreme, severe calcification in their coronary arteries, and that’s tightly linked to cardiovascular disease outcomes like heart disease and stroke, so we feel like it sends an important public health message that even if you feel that you’re healthy you should still go ahead and get definitive cardiovascular disease assessment. :30

Orimoloye notes that many risk calculators exist to predict one’s likelihood of having a cardiovascular event in the next ten years, but in order to make any assessment even healthy people need to see their doctor regularly, especially those with risk factors or a family history. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.