(PRWEB) October 01, 2014

Vascular Health and Risk Management has published the original research “Adding multiple risk factors improves Framingham coronary heart disease risk scores”.

As corresponding author Dr Martin Root says “For decades, the Framingham heart disease risk score, in its various forms, has been the gold standard for estimating heart disease risk in individuals. It is based on 7 well-known risk factors, such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels. During Framingham’s use, several new heart disease risk factors have been reported – begging the question of if and how these new factors could be added to the base equations. Many attempts have been made to integrate new risk factors, some successful and some not. Recently, one research group surveyed this area of research, declared most of these efforts failures, and suggested a rather strict standard of metrics by which future claims of improvement upon Framingham should be evaluated.”

Dr Root continues “In our research paper, we accepted the challenge using a proprietary modeling tool that adds new risk factors to established risk models, like Framingham. This method, Synthesis Analysis™, surveys the scientific literature for new risk factor additions and corrects, in a creative way, for statistical ground covered by previous risk factors. We constructed a practice model by adding 6 novel risk factors to the original Framingham model. We compared the performance of the new model with the original Framingham to assess heart disease risk in two existing survey datasets.

The results showed that the model with the additional risk factors outperformed the Framingham model, indicating the additions were successful, according to the strict criteria from the previous review. Furthermore, the level of new model improvement was roughly equivalent to adding one major risk factor, HDL cholesterol, to the original Framingham.

This analysis demonstrates the possibility of improving Framingham, while meeting the strict statistical standard set by others. This finding should encourage others to develop improved models.”

Vascular Health and Risk Management is an international, peer-reviewed journal of therapeutics and risk management, focusing on concise rapid reporting of clinical studies on the processes involved in the maintenance of vascular health; the monitoring, prevention, and treatment of vascular disease and its sequelae; and the involvement of metabolic disorders, particularly diabetes.

Dove Medical Press Ltd is a privately held company specializing in the publication of Open Access peer-reviewed journals across the broad spectrum of science, technology and especially medicine.







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