The good people of the American city of Framingham have been looking after the rest of us for many years. They have helped doctors from all around the world focus on the most important things that make a medical difference in our lives and ignore those that don’t.
The people of Framingham since the 1940′s have undergone a check-up every few years and looked their diet, BP and laboratory results that get looked at to see what factors might have predicted whether they are likely to have a heart attack. They are now following the grandchildren of the original group.
The nice thing is that you don’t need an expensive machine, any difficult to perform tests – you use age, male or female sex, total cholesterol, total good cholesterol (HDL) and systolic blood pressure, and whether you smoke.
Using this data it can tell your likely risk of a heart attack. This can help make a decision on how exactly to advise you or treat you. At present we have no way of changing age or sex, we can however help you stop smoking, lower your blood pressure and lower your cholesterol. Depending on the individual it is possible – if your factors are high to reduce your risk by about 2/3rds.
There is a lot of information that we know may also be important such as exercise, the kind of food you eat, other levels of blood tests and other diseases, the list may go on for ever. It was therefore somewhat reassuring to see an article recently published in JAMA which has looked at over 40 studies looking at factors that might improve the existing data.
Having examined these studies they found faults or difficulties with the majority of the studies and that the best performed studies did not show any major advantages of their particular pet addition to the pre-existing simple dataset.
This is used by myself as a guide to advising patients of their risks of heart disease and therefore I was much relieved that it appeared to have withstood the test of time and onslaught of very many often expensive tests. I am sure that as time goes on better tests will come about but right now the Framingham Heart Study data is a great way to start a conversation about risk of heart disease for an individual and ways that they might reduce them both medically and with lifestyle changes.
Here is more information about the Framingham Heart Study
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Thank you Dr. Stephen, for doing this great newsletter. I value your concern for the total health of a person and not just the current ailment.
Keep it coming, please
Thanks so much for your comment, Cassandra. There is a lot of interesting research about how we can stay healthy. I am trying to sort through some of that research and point out those that I think have general interest and merit and share them. We seem to be finding out that what we do ourselves makes a huge difference to our health. I am trying to get back to 2-3 articles a week depending on my schedule and information that might be of interest.