If you have at least two major risk factors for heart disease before you hit mid-life, your increased likelihood of having a heart attack or a stroke in your later decades stays pretty much constant. On the flip side, though, if you have a good risk profile up to the age of 55, you are probably protected for the rest of your life. Those are the conclusions of a study done at Northwestern University in Chicago and published on January 26th in the "New England Journal of Medicine." The researchers found that subjects who had two or more factors such as hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, and smoking at 55 had a 29.6% chance of death from cardiovascular disease by age 80 for men and 20.5% for women. Yet for 55-year-olds without cardiovascular risk factors, the lifetime risk turned out to be 4.7% for men and 6.4% for women.
The authors' Cardiovascular Lifetime Risk Pooling Project assessed cohort studies from the past 50 years. "The presence or absence of traditional risk factors appears to represent a much more consistent determinant of the long-term risk of cardiovascular disease than race or birth cohort," the scientists wrote, according to MedPage Today.
However, the researchers pointed out that because some patients in the analyses had received treatment, estimates of future risk may have been underestimated. Even so, that group of patients was quite small. Also, lifetime risk could not be estimated for subjects from the most recent decade because of the short length of time for follow up. That said, the researchers believe that their findings will be applicable to the general population going forward.
