New Risk Factors Linked to Heart Disease

If you're a postmenopausal woman, you may be more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than you think. It used to be that age, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and smoking were the major risk factors that were used by most doctors to assess the risk of heart disease for older women. But new research, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) February 14, 2007, shows that there are two more very important risk factors that should be considered.

As a result, Johns Hopkins cardiologists are calling for an expansion of the criteria to assess a postmenopausal woman's chances of developing cardiovascular disease. Those two new risk factors are family history and blood levels of a protein tied to blood vessel inflammation.

According to the new research, if a woman's parent or a sibling has suffered a coronary event, her own chances of arterial disease are doubled. Her risk is also doubled if she has high blood levels of C-reactive protein, in excess of 3 milligrams per liter. If both new risk factors are present, a woman's probability of having a heart attack or stroke jumps nearly fourfold. By adding the two new risk factors, the risk scores changed for at least 20% of the women studied.

This comes as no surprise to Dr. Roger Blumenthal, who is the director of the Ciccarone Preventive Cardiology Center at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Blumenthal conducted research in 2005 using the old Framingham Risk Estimate that has two fewer risk factors than the new one called the Reynolds Risk Score. The old risk model failed to identify about 30% of women over age 60 that had advanced hardening and narrowing of the arteries.