What if a person’s risk of heart disease could be predicted years in advance?
A new study found that a simple blood test could predict heart disease in women years before problems develop.
“We can’t treat what we don’t measure, and we hope these findings move the field closer to identifying even earlier ways to detect and prevent heart disease,” said Dr. Paul Ridker, one of the authors of the study and the director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.
The study found that measuring two types of fat in the bloodstream and a protein marker of inflammation can predict a woman’s risk for cardiovascular disease decades later.
“In recent years, we’ve learned more about how increased levels of inflammation can interact with lipids to compound cardiovascular disease risks,” said Dr. Ahmed A.K. Hasan, a medical officer and program director at NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. “This helps explain why lower levels are often better.”
Fox News reports on this “big step forward” in women’s health monitoring. Here’s the start of the story:
Predicting a woman’s future heart disease risk could be as simple as administering a single blood test to screen for three risk factors.
That’s according to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Saturday — research that was also presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress this weekend.
The study, which included nearly 30,000 women averaging 55 years of age, measured two types of fat in the bloodstream along with a certain type of protein with a blood test in 1993, then monitored the participants’ health for a 30-year period, the researchers said
“The strongest predictor of risk was a simple blood measure of inflammation known as high sensitivity C-reactive protein, or hsCRP, followed by cholesterol and lipoprotein(a),” lead study author Dr. Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told Fox News Digital.