Should ethnicity be included in cardiovascular risk stratification?

Excerpt

Assessment of patients’ individual cardiovascular risk is common in routine clinical practice. However, the traditional risk factors to stratify risk are based on population estimates and may not directly apply to the individual patient. Patients with a high calculated cardiovascular risk may not suffer an event and vice versa. The Framingham score estimates the 10-year risk of a cardiovascular event based on several clinical and laboratory variables. Ethnicity is known to be related to risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), but is not included in most risk scores. Also, differences in traditional risk factors do not fully explain the racial differences in CVD risk. To improve the ability to predict individual events, new biomarkers and imaging methods are currently being evaluated. Imaging for atherosclerosis using coronary artery calcium (CAC) and carotid intima media thickness (CIMT) may offer a valuable tool in this approach and is recommended (class IIa) in asymptomatic adults at moderate risk in the current ESC guidelines on cardiovascular disease prevention in clinical practice [1]. …