Word: heartfully
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...cheaper and faster. A team of U.S. researchers publishing this week in the medical journal Lancet finds that simple, inexpensive tests for cardiovascular risk factors - performed in less than 10 minutes, using a scale, a tape measure and a blood-pressure check - are every bit as effective at determining heart-disease risk as more expensive procedures involving laboratory-based tests. It's not exactly a do-it-yourself kit, but it can help doctors screen patients more quickly, leading to potentially more effective treatment - in both the developed and developing world...
...American adults participating in the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants were initially examined in the early 1970s and had no prior history of cardiovascular disease; they were tracked for 21 years, during which time 1,529 of the participants suffered cardiovascular events (such as heart attacks, stroke, angina or heart failure), including 578 deaths due to heart disease...
Researchers looked at patient measurements typically used to assess heart disease risk: age, systolic blood pressure, smoking status, total cholesterol, diabetes status and any hypertension treatment. They found that they could substitute body mass index (or BMI, a ratio of height to weight), a noninvasive measure, for the lab-based blood test for cholesterol and still accurately predict patients' five-year cardiovascular disease risk...
Gaziano and his colleagues show that if simple measurements, like BMI, are thoughtfully considered, doctors with fewer resources in the developing world can screen for heart-disease risk just as effectively as their counterparts in high-income countries. There is some question about whether results from the U.S. can be applied accurately to other populations - for a given BMI, for example, Asians tend to have a higher body-fat ratio than Caucasians - but, in many ways, Americans of the 1970s may be more similar than not to populations elsewhere today. In the '70s, Americans smoked a lot more tobacco than...
...second article in this week's Lancet shows that heart-disease risk factors are rapidly becoming more common worldwide, even in sub-Saharan Africa, where infectious disease remains a big killer. In theory, African doctors should be among those who benefit most from the new paper's findings. In resource-poor settings, saving the $1 to $3 cost of a lab blood test (in the U.S. it costs $10, according to the Lancet paper) would certainly be meaningful - but that's assuming the tests were being performed to start with. The real savings are difficult to calculate, in large part...