New heart disease risk score outperforms existing test

PA 186/09 An independent external validation of QRISK" - a new score for predicting a person's risk of heart disease - has shown that it performs better than the existing test and should be recommended for use in the United Kingdom by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). The University of Nottingham and leading healthcare systems supplier EMIS worked together, through the not-for-profit partnership QResearch, to develop the ground-breaking formula which has been strongly endorsed in new research published in the British Medical Journal. Researchers from the University of Oxford have recommended its widespread use across the UK in place of the more commonly-used Framingham equation. Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox of The University of Nottingham's Division of Primary Care, said: "We are delighted to receive another strong endorsement of the value of QRISK in assessing the risk of heart disease in the UK population. We believe this formula has the potential to save many thousands of lives, by helping clinicians to more accurately predict those at risk of developing cardiovascular disease — the nation's biggest killer. It will arm doctors with all the information they need to decide how best to target patients with preventative measures such as lifestyle advice and cholesterol-lowering treatments." Soon every patient's record will contain an automatically calculated heart risk score allowing GPs to identify and target those at greatest risk. NICE currently recommends that doctors use a modified version of the long established Framingham score to identify who should be offered statin treatment to reduce their risk of heart disease over the next 10 years.