‘Your Heart Forecast’: a new approach for describing and communicating cardiovascular risk?

[...]the absolute benefits of blood pressure or lipid-lowering treatment have been observed to be two- to threefold greater in patients with 'average' blood pressure or blood lipid levels but high absolute CVD risk compared with patients with much higher levels of one or other of these risk factors but a lower pretreatment absolute CVD risk. 4 The traditional approach to CVD risk-factor management was based on evidence from cohort or case-control studies that people with a significantly raised level of an individual risk factor were at a higher CVD risk relative to people with lower levels of this risk factor. [...]the atherosclerotic process underlying ischaemic events results from an interaction of many risk factors, with modest increases in multiple risk factors being more harmful than a significantly raised level of any single factor. 4 Third, CVD risk is influenced by the length of exposure to risk factors that is poorly characterised by measurement of risk factors at one point in time.