Should heart risk be recalculated?
By UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
The research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, explores the implications of
broadly implementing the PREVENT equations, introduced by the American Heart
Association in November 2023. These equations are intended
to refine the tools doctors use to estimate a patient’s 10-year risk of a heart
attack or stroke.
At a population level, the number of adults
recommended for statins could decrease from 45.4 million to 28.3 million. At
the same time, the study showed that most people who would be recommended to
take statins are not currently taking them.
“This is an opportunity to refocus our efforts and invest resources in the populations of patients at the highest risk,” said lead author Dr. Timothy Anderson, M.D., M.A.S., a primary care physician at UPMC and health services researcher and assistant professor of medicine at Pitt.
Methodology of the
Study
For their analysis, the team used nationally
representative data from 3,785 adults, ages 40 to 75, who participated in the
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from January 2017 to March
2020. The researchers estimated the 10-year risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) using the Predicting
Risk of cardiovascular disease EVENTs (PREVENT) equations and compared the
results to risk estimated using the previous tool, known as Pooled Cohort
Equations (PCE).
The PREVENT equations were developed by the American
Heart Association to more accurately represent risk across
the current U.S. population, as the PCE equations were based on patient data
that were decades old and lacked diversity.
PREVENT also reflects more recent insights
into the biology of ASCVD. Current statin use as well as metabolic and kidney
diseases are incorporated into the new calculation, while race has been removed
from it, reflecting a growing awareness that race is a social construct.
Using PREVENT, the team found that among the
study’s entire cohort, the 10-year risk of developing ASCVD was 4%, half as
high as the risk calculated by the PCE (8%). The difference was even larger for
Black adults (5.1% versus 10.9%) and for adults between the ages of 70 and 75
(10.2% versus 22.8%).
An estimated 4.1 million patients who are
currently taking statins would no longer be recommended to take them based on
PREVENT. For these patients and their physicians, clear and careful
communication is key, said Anderson. “We don’t want people to think they were
treated incorrectly in the past. They were treated with the best data we had
when the PCE was introduced back in 2013. The data have changed.”
At the same time, it’s important to note that
everyone’s risk will inevitably change over time, as well, he added. “For a
patient who we now know is at lower risk than we previously thought, if we
recommend they stop taking statins, they still could be back to a higher risk
five years down the road, for the simple reason that everybody’s risk goes up
as we get older.”
Reference: “Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular
Disease Risk Estimates Using the Predicting Risk of Cardiovascular Disease
Events Equations” by Timothy S. Anderson, Linnea M. Wilson and Jeremy B.
Sussman, 10 June 2024, JAMA Internal Medicine.
DOI:
10.1001/jamainternmed.2024.1302
Other authors on the study were Linnea
Wilson, M.P.H., of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Jeremy B. Sussman,
M.D., M.P.H., of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
This research was supported by the National
Institute on Aging (#K76AG074878).