Heart-disease risk factors build up

Almost half of Americans who are free of cardiovascular disease at age 50 will develop it later in life, a study suggests.

That figure drops to 5.2 percent among 50-year-old men who don't smoke, aren't diabetic and have low cholesterol and blood pressure. Such people, about 3 in every 100 men in the study group, live about 11 years longer than men who have two or more of the risk factors at age 50, the researchers said. The study was published Monday in the journal Circulation.

"We need a real shift in public health. People need to be treated intensively to prevent the outcome of the risk factors," said the study leader, Donald Lloyd-Jones, in a Feb. 3 telephone interview. "We need to get more people to age 50 with optimal risk factors."

The 4.5 percent of women with "optimal" health risks had about 8 chances in 100 of developing cardiovascular disease. About seven in 10 men and half of women with two or more "major" risk factors, as defined by the researchers, stand to develop cardiovascular disease, the researchers wrote.

Although mortality rates from cardiovascular disease have declined in the U.S. recently, no other illness comes close to it as a killer of Americans. Cardiovascular disease accounts for about four in 10 deaths in the U.S., or twice as many as for all forms of cancer combined, said Lloyd-Jones, 41, a cardiologist at Northwestern University's medical school in Chicago.

The research, funded in part by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md., used data from the continuing Framingham Heart Study. The latest research involved data on 3,564 men and 4,362 women. The journal Circulation is published by the Dallas-based American Heart Association.

The research showed that 52 percent of the men and 39 percent of the women developed cardiovascular disease in their lifetime. Those figures cover the chances of getting the disease by age 95. The researchers also concluded that 50-year-old men have a 35 percent chance of getting cardiovascular illness by age 75, compared with 19 percent for women.

Lloyd-Jones said people can use drugs and take other actions to mitigate risks after 50. Even better, he said, is to cut future risk through diet and exercise decades earlier.

The number of 50-year-olds with optimal risk factors is "tragically low," he said. Having two or more "major" risk factors raises the chances of getting cardiovascular disease to 69 percent for men and 50 percent for women.