New Delhi, April 4 Widely used heart disease risk calculators may be failing to identify a large proportion of Indians at risk, with nearly 80 per cent of patients who eventually suffered a heart attack not being classified as 'high-risk' beforehand, according to new research.
The research, titled "Comparison of ASCVD Risk Prediction Models in STEMI: Insights from a South Asian Cohort," was conducted by a team of scientists from Govind Ballabh Pant Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, ESIC Medical College, Faridabad, the Delhi Cancer Registry at AIIMS, among others.
The study, conducted on 4,975 patients with first-time heart attacks, found significant differences in how five major global risk prediction models categorized individuals, raising concerns over their reliability for South Asian populations.
Researchers compared widely used tools such as the Framingham Risk Score (FRS), ACC/AHA ASCVD 2013 model, WHO risk charts, JBS-3 calculator, and the newer Predicting Risk of Cardiovascular Disease Events (PREVENT) score.
They found that while some models classified about 20 per cent of patients as 'high-risk', others identified far fewer, with the ASCVD 2013 model flagging only about 12.3 per cent, meaning a large majority were placed in 'low' or 'moderate-risk' categories.
"When we put Indian heart attack patients through these Western models, many of them are wrongly classified. Physiologically, they should be considered 'high-risk' patients, especially since they went on to have a heart attack, but these models place them in low- and medium-risk categories, raising serious concerns about prevention," Dr. Mohit Gupta, Professor of Cardiology at GB Pant Hospital and a researcher involved in the study, told