Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Rates of cardiovascular disease (CVD) such as heart attack, coronary heart disease or stroke in young adults (younger than 50 years old) have not decreased over the past two decades. Primary prevention, which is aimed to reduce risk factors and avoid CVD completely, is the best way to change this situation. Current screening algorithms that assess risk of CVD are sufficiently effective in finding individuals in older populations who are at high risk of the disease and who are candidates for preventive therapy. However, because all current risk calculators are highly dependent on age, they often underperform in young people. Consequently, many young adults remain undiagnosed and unaware of their high risk of CVD, do not receive further screening procedures, and do not receive preventive treatment. In this study we: 1) assessed the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors, such as high blood cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure in the population of young adults with CVD in British Columbia and evaluated how many of these patients had their risk estimated and received preventive treatment before developing CVD; 2) Using medical history of these patients and other data available I estimated how many of these patients would not have been identified by current risk calculators and screening guidelines as being at high risk and good candidates for preventive treatment before developing the disease. We found, that the prevalence of all risk factors was high and 81.5% of patients had multiple risk factors, but only 61.6% would be recognised as patients at high risk and eligible for preventive treatment according to the current Canadian guidelines and only 15.7% of these patients had received primary prevention before developing the disease. The study provided important knowledge about the determinants of premature CVD in a contemporary Canadian population. It will inform the development of better screening and treatment approaches.