Your 10-year Heart Disease Risk

It was great to be back in clinic yesterday. I saw lot's of interesting new patients with a variety of heart arrhythmias and a few patient's with coronary disease. One younger patient commented that he had his cholesterol checked, but had no clue what the numbers meant.

Oh he knew something about "good choleterol" (HDL) and "bad cholesterol" (LDL) but he was more concerned about what those numbers on his panel meant to him, as far as heart attack risk was concerned.

So I referred him to this handy calculator. It plugs in some very basic information and calculates (based on a nomogram of a large database of subject), what the percentage likelihood that someone will have a heart attack in the next 10 years. Realize the data for this risk calculator may be somewhat limited because they were obtained at a time before so many of us were obese and before the wide-spread penetration of statin drugs in the population, but it still gives meaning to your cholesterol level based on your age and gender.

So, what's your risk?