Clinical Diabetes 24:178, 2006
© American Diabetes Association ®, Inc., 2006
Know Your Chance of Developing Heart Disease
Heart attack and stroke are the most important causes of death in people
with diabetes. It is important for people with diabetes to know their risk for
heart attacks and stroke and take steps to prevent them.
One way to find out about your risk of heart attack and stroke is to use a
computer program. Computer programs use information about things that affect
your risk. These things are called "risk factors." The risk
factors include your age, sex, blood pressure, cholesterol level, and whether
you smoke. Some of the computer programs also use your blood glucose level.
These programs do not include some risk factors, including your weight or
family history of heart attack, because those factors, while important, do not
improve the accuracy of the programs' risk calculations very much.
One program, Heart to Heart, is available on the Internet at
www.med-decisions.com.
You will need your most recent blood pressure and cholesterol levels (both the
total and HDL ["good"] cholesterol). The program will ask you to
enter your information, and then it will show you your risk of having heart
attack during the next 10 years. Using the program takes about 5 minutes.
Here is an example. Imagine a 45-year-old woman with diabetes. She does not
smoke. She has known that she has diabetes for 5 years. She exercises
regularly, walking for 30 minutes three times per week. Her blood pressure is
130/80 mmHg. She recently had a cholesterol test at work. It showed a total
cholesterol level of 230 mg/dl and an HDL cholesterol level of 60 mg/dl. She
wants to know her risk of heart disease. The computer program estimates the
risk of heart attack or heart-related chest pain as being 6% over the next 10
years. That means if there were 100 people just like this patient, about six
would be expected to develop heart disease in the next decade.
Once you know your risk, you can consider ways to lower it if it is too
high. Most doctors consider a risk of 10% or more over 10 years to be too
high. There are several ways to lower risk, including taking aspirin, treating
high blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, better controlling your blood
glucose, and exercising more. Discuss your options with your doctor, and
choose the ones that are best for you. You may want to consider issues such as
the possible side effects, costs, and ease or difficulty of the various
options to help you decide which are best for you.
 CiteULike  Del.icio.us  Digg  Reddit  Technorati What's this?
|
|
|
