Risk Factors in Health and Disease

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3. Reducing Exposure to Risk Factors

Reducing contact (exposure) to risk factors would greatly improve global health and life expectancy by many years. This would therefore reduce healthcare costs.

One good example demonstrating this is ‘The Systematic COronary Risk Evaluation Project’ (The SCORE project). The SCORE project data are based on national data sets from Europe, totalling around 250,000 people with around 3 million patient-years of follow-up. The SCORE risk assessment is a simple tool to predict deaths relating to heart or circulation problems (fatal cardiovascular disease, CVD) over a 10-year period.

It is based on the following risk factors:

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Smoking habits
  • Systolic blood pressure
  • Total cholesterol levels.

The threshold for being at high risk is defined as ≥ 5% (greater than or equal to 5 per cent); this means that 5 or more out of 100 people will die within 10 years.