QRISK lifetime risk tool developed

The creators of the QRISK tool for identifying patients at high risk of cardiovascular disease have developed a new “lifetime score” to help GPs target advice at younger people.

The new formula has been developed by Nottingham University, using the QResearch database.

This is a not-for-profit partnership between the university and healthcare IT supplier EMIS, to which more than 500 GP practices regularly contribute.

Researchers from the university used data from the electronic records of more than 2.5m patients to develop the new lifetime score, which takes account of a number of factors including social deprivation and ethnicity.

Reporting their results in the BMJ, the research team said the majority of GPs in the UK currently have access to the QRISK2 formula which predicts cardiovascular disease risk over ten years.

Research leader Professor Julia Hippisley Cox, professor of clinical epidemiology and general practice in the School of Community Health, said the new score had the potential to identify young people with a high risk over the course of their lifetime who are not picked up by the more conventional 10 year risk scores.

She added: “By identifying people at a younger age, GPs will have more chance of intervening before heart disease sets in, to help reduce their lifetime risk through treatments and lifestyle advice.”

The researchers said the new formula was the first published risk score to estimate the lifetime risk of heart disease.

The team worked with the Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry in London and the Avon Primary Care Research Collaborative to produce the model, which the researchers said was based on a large, ethnically diverse population.

They said the model could be updated and refined over time to take account of trends in population characteristics, changes in clinical requirements and improved methods of communicating cardiovascular risk to patients.

Professor Hippisley-Cox said the study left a number of unanswered questions including whether early intervention in people with a high lifetime risk but low 10-year risk would have a greater clinical benefit than later intervention.