Is the new calculator for assessing the 10-year risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease flawed, as suggested by a recent news article, or does it work exactly as the committee members of the risk-assessment guidelines expected it to?
In an article published November 18, 2013 in the New York Times, two physicians testing the accuracy of the new risk calculator developed by the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and American Heart Association (AHA) found that it vastly overestimated patient risk. Drs. Paul Ridker and Nancy Cook (Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA) calculated the 10-year risk of cardiovascular events in three large-scale primary prevention cohorts—the Women’s Health Study(WHS), the Physicians’ Health Study (PHS), and the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study (WHI-OS) — and found the new algorithm overestimated the risk by 75% to 150%.
Read the full article.
Filed under: Cardiology, EBM | Tagged: cardiology, risk |
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