In a new research published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal, scientists have developed a new risk score that can predict the 10-year risk of developing heart disease or having a stroke in people 40 years and older in any country of the world.

The research was led by Dr. Goodarz Danaei, Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, USA and colleagues. The new score called Globorisk was developed, validated and evaluated by using data from eight cohort studies with more than 50,000 participants. Compared to previous risk scores, Globorisk can be updated according to local conditions and risk factor levels in different countries.

Dr Danaei explains, "Globorisk is an important advance in the field of global cardiovascular disease prevention. Until now, most prediction scores were developed using a single cohort study and were never validated for accuracy in national populations for low- and middle-income countries. Therefore, clinicians and public health policy makers in these countries were left without a reliable tool to predict cardiovascular risk in their patients, community, or country.

The new score measures cardiovascular risk by factoring in the individual's smoking status, blood pressure, diabetes status and total cholesterol level. It adjusts for the effects of sex and age on cardiovascular disease between countries.

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