Cardiovascular Risk Calculator Overestimates Events

Calculating cardiovascular risk has become a central and highly controversial component of cardiovascular guidelines. Now a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that most of the commonly employed tools seriously overestimate the risk of people today.

Researchers used data from 4227 people enrolled in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis between 2000 and 2002 to assess the predictive accuracy of the new AHA/ACC atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease tool and 4 alternative risk scores: FRS-CHD, the ATP-III-FRS-CHD, the Reynolds Risk Score (RRS), and the FRS-CVD.

They found that 4 out of the 5 scores overestimated risk for men by as little as 37% and by as much as 154% and for women by as little as 8% and as much as 67%. The RRS overestimated risk in men by 9% but underestimated risk in women by 21%.

Read more at Forbes: http://onforb.es/1Am9bfT