The American Heart Association (AHA) recently developed a new assessment tool called the Million Hearts Model Longitudinal ASCVD Risk Assessment tool, which may improve accuracy for determining heart disease risks.
The new tool received funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the American College of Cardiology and the AHA.
The tool is designed to allow doctors to predict whether someone will develop atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASVCD) in a decade. It should also determine whether that risk will alter over time after the patient tries various preventive treatments.
“The new tool is based upon a formal systematic review of the evidence of ABCS therapies to define what the expected risk reduction would be from each one, used alone or in combination,” Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of the writing committee that describes the new tool, said. “At an initial visit, clinicians can use the tool to project the expected updated risk if one or more of the ABCS interventions were initiated, then it can be used at a subsequent follow-up visit to estimate what is the actual achieved updated risk based on the patient’s individual response to those therapies and any lifestyle changes they may have made as well.”
