Doctors use a set of calculations to determine the risk of a heart attack or stroke in patients.
The calculations are called pooled cohort equations, or PCEs. PCEs are the foundation for heart-disease-prevention guidelines.
The numbers can help doctors decide whether they should prescribe aspirin, blood pressure or statin drugs.
But in a recent study from Stanford University, researchers found that in the U.S., more than 11 million people may have incorrect prescriptions for aspirin, statins and blood pressure drugs due to inaccurate PCEs.
The study is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Currently, most doctors calculate a patient’s risk using a PCE web calculator or a smartphone app.
The equations are also built into many electronic health records to estimate a patient’s risk during a clinic visit.
In the study, the team found that PCEs may be done using outdated data and calculate the disease risk incorrectly. This can put some patients at risk for over- or under-treatment.
For instance one of the main data set for deriving the original equations uses information from people who were 30-62 years old in 1948.
These people were 100 to 132 years old in 2018, and most of them are likely dead.
In addition, there is a lot has changed in terms of diets, environments and medical treatment since the 1940s.
Using old data to estimate people’s risk can be risky and overestimate people’s disease risk.
The old data also may not have a sufficient sample of African-Americans.
The researchers say it is important to update the PCEs with newer data to improve the accuracy of heart disease risk estimates.
Copyright © 2019 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
