BOSTON, May 2 (UPI) -- A new method developed at Harvard predicts midrange heart attack risk better than the standard Framingham risk score, say U.S. doctors.
The Reynolds instrument consists of the six parameters used in the Framingham model -- age, sex, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, smoking status and systolic blood pressure -- plus two new measures: C-reactive protein level and whether a parent had a heart attack before age 60.
The Harvard developers tested the Reynolds system using information collected from over 24,000 women who were followed for more than a decade.
The researchers said that, while both the Framingham and the Reynolds instruments predicted women at high and low risk equally well, the Reynolds tool correctly identified women in the middle of the risk range, which has always been a problem for the Framingham measure.
When a computer checked the Reynolds predictions against what actually happened to these women, they were almost 100 percent accurate.
The team said it is now checking to see if Reynolds works as well for men. The new method is posted at www.reynoldsriskscore.org.
The study appears in the May issue of the Harvard Heart Letter.
