Today is the American Heart Association's National Wear Red Day. February is American Heart Month. These designations were created to increase our awareness of heart disease. Do you know that heart disease claims more lives each year than any other disease or cause of death?

Data from the Cardiovascular Lifetime Risk Pooling Project recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine underscores the importance of lowering the risk factors for heart disease. The meta-analysis was conducted on 18 epidemiological studies involving 257,384 people whose risk factors for cardiovascular disease were measured at the ages of 45, 55, 65, and 75 years. The risk factors studied were blood pressure, cholesterol level, smoking status, and diabetes status. The study included both men and women, white and black.

The significant finding from the analysis is that middle-aged adults who have one or more elevated risk factors for CVD have a substantially greater chance of having a major CVD event, such as heart attack or stroke, during their remaining lifetime compared with people with optimal levels of risk factors. Specific findings from the data include:

• Men who were 55 years old with at least two major risk factors were six times as likely to die from CVD by age 80 as were men with no or only one CVD risk factor (29.6 percent vs. 4.7 percent).
• Women with at least two major risk factors were three times as likely to die from CVD as were women with no or only one CVD risk factor (20.5 percent vs. 6.4 percent).
• Forty-five-year-old men with two or more risk factors had a 49.5 percent chance of having a major CVD event through age 80.
• Forty-five-year-old women with two or more risk factors had a 30.7 percent chance of having a major CVD event through age 80.
• Men with optimal risk factor levels only had a 1.4 percent chance of having a major CVD event through age 80.
• Women had a 4.1 percent chance of having a major CVD event through age 80.

According to Susan B. Shurin, M.D., acting director of the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, “Prevention of cardiovascular disease is a lifetime opportunity for and a responsibility of individuals, families, communities, and the health care system. The results from the analysis reinforces the fact that cardiovascular disease can be prevented and controlled throughout the course of an adult’s lifetime.”

The results from this analysis should be a wake up call to everyone. It is important for each adult to assess his or her risk for a heart attack. Adults should also know their blood pressure and cholesterol numbers and whether they are at risk for diabetes. Because even mild elevations in risk factors by middle age can significantly increase the lifetime risk of DVD, it is important to promote healthy lifestyles in children and young adults.

Dr. Grandma’s blog post last year, Sweetheart, Your Heart Is So Very Dear to Me, gives excellent references and suggestions for lowering your risk factors for heart disease. In addition, the NIH websites, Your Guide to a Healthy Heart and Million Hearts Campaign are excellent resources for improving your cardiovascular health.