Researchers have developed a new method to calculate the risk of heart attack a person faces that is more precise than the procedure using traditional risk factors alone.
Levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, body mass index (BMI), smoking habits and blood pressure are considered traditional risk factors. There are several risk prediction calculators available today. However, the use of these calculators has declined because they only predict a modest proportion of incidence.
For myocardial infarctions (the medical term for heart attacks), it is estimated that 15 to 20 per cent of patients had none of the traditional risk factors, and would thus be classified as “low risk.”
“Our study showed that by measuring a combination of five different microRNAs and adding this information to the traditional risk factors for cardiovascular disease, we could identify those that were going to experience a myocardial infarction with considerably improved precision,” said the study’s author Anja Bye of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
The study was published in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology .
The researchers designed this study to explore the possibility of a new type of bio marker called circulating microRNAs, to predict 10-year risk for myocardial infarction. They included 212 participants (40-70 years old) from the Nord-Trondelag Health Study 2 (HUNT2, blood collected in 1996) who either died of heart attack within 10 years or remained healthy at the time of HUNT3 (2006).
