A New Way to Calculate Your Disease Risk

By Dena Rifkin, MD

Here’s a sobering realization: No matter how well I take care of my patients, all of them—that’s right, all of them—are going to die someday. This pessimistic thought came to me this week as I was reviewing some of the recent cardiac-risk calculators.

These tools, many of which were based on a landmark observational research program in Framingham, Mass., allow physicians to estimate an individual’s risk of cardiac death over the next 10 years, or over a lifetime. Surprisingly few variables count in this calculation: age, gender, smoking history, blood pressure, presence of diabetes, and cholesterol level. Read More