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According to a paper published Monday in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, fewer than 8% of all Americans can now be considered at low risk for heart disease. No one needs a statistician's help to know that that means more than 92% of us are not as healthy as we could be, and that's worth paying attention...
...that portion of the survey, the investigators focused on people in the 25-to-74 age group and evaluated five different risk factors for cardiovascular disease: blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking history, obesity and diabetes. To be considered at low risk, subjects had to have a blood pressure reading of 120/80 mm Hg or lower without the aid of medication and a cholesterol level below 200 mg/dL, also without drugs. They had to be nonsmokers or at least former smokers, not be overweight or obese, and never have been diagnosed with diabetes. "From a prevention point of view, it's important...
That's why it's troubling that so few of us did. In the latest NHANES, just 7.5% of adults were considered low risk in all five areas. That's a significant dip from the 10.5% in the 1988-94 survey - which was already a decidedly poor score. Within the adult population, there is no particular demographic slice that's doing particularly well, but some are clearly faring better than others. Among women in the current study, 10.5% were considered low risk (a decrease from 15.5% in the previous survey), compared to just 4.8% of men (down from...
...current numbers are, they are actually not historic lows. In the 1971-75 survey, just 4.4% of the entire sample group was considered low risk; that percentage climbed to 5.7% in the next survey before peaking in the third one. The trend was reversed this time around. "Until the 1990s, we were headed in a positive direction," says Ford. "But then it took a turn...
...steady increase but one that's shocking all the same. Once those children reach the 25-to-74 demographic, their heart-disease risk could cause the national numbers to explode. "As these children grow up, I expect to see a decrease in the number of people who qualify as low risk," says Dr. Seema Kumar, a pediatric endocrinologist and medical director of the Weight Management Program for Children at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "Our obese children are at high risk of becoming obese adults; some of them are already developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes...