- Researchers say current heart health calculation tools may be underestimating the risk of heart attack and stroke for people of South Asian descent.
- They say these heart “calculators” should be adjusted to account for this higher risk.
- Researchers also note that more studies should be done on why heart health issues are more common in people of South Asian ancestry.
Common heart health calculation tools may be dangerously deficient in accurately assessing risk among people of South Asian ancestry, a new study suggests.
Researchers compared data from 8,124 people of South Asian descent with data from 449,349 people of European ancestry.
During an 11-year period, researchers found that nearly 7 percent of study participants of South Asian ancestry had a heart attack, stroke, or needed another cardiovascular procedure versus 4 percent of participants of European ancestry.
Participants in the South Asian-descended cohort were more likely to have had cardiovascular disease risk factors, such as type 2 diabetes, excess belly fat, and high blood pressure, than participants in the European-descended cohort.
However, even controlling for these factors, study participants of South Asian descent still had a 45 percent higher risk of heart problems, indicating a level of additional absolute risk at the genetic level.
But that increase in risk is currently not reflected in heart risk “calculators” used in Europe and the United States.
“This is a very interesting study. Typical heart risk calculators use variables like lipids, age, sex, hypertension, diabetes, body mass index score, etc., to calculate someone’s risk for cardiovascular disease,” Dr. Jennifer Haden Haythe, a critical care cardiologist, associate professor of medicine, and co-director of the Columbia Women’s Heart Center in New York City, told Healthline.
“This study is highlighting that certain genetic factors like ancestry are not factored into these calculators but in fact are strong predictors of risk,” she said.
Source: healthline