Affairs of the heart
despite the developments that have helped doctors understand and fortify the human cardiovascular system, medical science is still groping about blindly when it comes to one very crucial question: how to assess whether an individual will develop heart problems or not? But then predicting the future is never easy, and more so when it concerns the health of an individual or a certain section of the population.
Doctors, however, are under constant pressure to develop better tools and techniques that would reduce the role of chance from all the equations of human health. And though they know the various risk factors and the "do's' and "don'ts' involved in heart disorders, it is still not easy for them to predict who is prone to develop the disease and who is not. But new research has shown that soon they may have the information to do just that.
In a study recently published in Circulation (Vol 97, No 18), Peter W F Wilson and his team from the Framingham Heart Study, usa , describe a new scoring system that can assess a patient's chances of developing heart problems from various risk factors involved. These include his/her blood pressure and blood cholesterol levels, age, whether the patient is a smoker, and whether he/she is a diabetic. The individual's chances of having a heart attack is then calculated as an one-digit number. Using this new system of scoring
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