Nottingham: New method for assessing cardiovascular risk

Research lead

Scientists at Nottingham University in the UK have developed a new and more accurate method of assessing people at risk from cardiovascular disease (CVD), QRisk2, an equation developed to help doctors identify those most at risk of developing CVD for the first time. The method simultaneously takes into account extra risk arising from ethnicity, social deprivation and other clinical conditions such as family history of heart disease or diabetes.

The development of QRisk2, was undertaken by QResearch, a not-for-profit partnership between the university and the primary care systems supplier EMIS.

Doctors will be able to use this information to help decide how best to target patients with preventative measures such as lifestyle advice and cholesterol-lowering treatments.

According to the researchers certain ethnic groups are at much greater risk than the general population, with men of Pakistani background being nearly twice as likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke. For Bangladeshi men, the risk increases by nearly 70 per cent.

QRisk2 identifies the risk of CVD in this portion of the population, indicating that in Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, the risk is 43 per cent, 80 per cent and 35 per cent higher, respectively, than in the background population.

QRisk2 project leader, Julia Hippisley-Cox said, “Based on the study of 15 years of data from over 2 million UK patients, QRisk2 is a contemporary and specific risk score that allows CVD risk to be personalised to the individual patient.”

QResearch is one of the world’s largest primary care databases, containing anonymised data from 11 million patients across the UK. New data is uploaded each night from the 551 EMIS general practices that participate in the project. The data are available for research to benefit public healthcare.