How Do You Know If You’re at High Risk for a Heart Attack? - Health Blog - WSJ

Image via Wikipedia

By Jacob Goldstein

If you’re 20 or older and don’t have diabetes or heart disease, you can plug a handful of simple variables — things like age, cholesterol level and blood pressure — into a Framingham risk calculator and find out your chances of having serious heart trouble (a heart attack or coronary death) in the next 10 years.

Still, some 300,000 Americans die every year of sudden cardiac death outside the hospital, and many of those people don’t have classic risk factors for heart disease. Non-fatal heart attacks, too, remain difficult to predict for many patients.So there’s an understandable urge on the part of researchers to find new measures that will better predict who is at risk.

Continue Reading