HealthDay TV: Heart Healthy

Staying heart healthy means knowing your risk of cardiovascular disease. Now, a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds traditional methods for measuring that risk may be better than newer tests.
Doctors usually look at factors like cholesterol level, blood pressure, diet and other lifestyle choices. But researchers wanted to know if biomarkers may be more useful in helping predict future events like heart attack and stroke.
Between 1991 and 1994, doctors at Lund University in Sweden examined more than 5000 patients without cardiovascular disease.... evaluating multiple biomarkers in each participant. More than a decade later, they followed up and discovered that the benefit of using biomarkers was minimal in comparison to conventional models.
Only a small number of individuals were moved to new risk categories with the addition of biomarkers and the reclassifications did not result in clinically significant outcomes.
Getting back to basics might just be the ticket, after all. At least in determining heart risk. I'm Dr. Cindy Haines for HealthDay TV