Assessing Cardiometabolic Risk

A number of groups and organizations have emphasized the importance of considering all known risk factors when assessing global cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. However, the risk assessment algorithms used mainly take into account traditional risk factors such as age, sex, family history, blood pressure, smoking, cholesterol (both LDL and HDL), and diabetes. With abdominal obesity now at epidemic proportions, many individuals are at increased relative risk of CVD because of the presence of a constellation of metabolic abnormalities often referred to as the metabolic syndrome. It has been suggested that the CVD risk of abdominal obesity/metabolic syndrome may be independent from or go beyond the risk predicted by traditional risk factors. A model has therefore been developed to incorporate abdominal obesity/metabolic syndrome risk into the risk conferred by traditional risk factors. This global CVD risk is defined as global cardiometabolic risk, and new algorithms will be necessary to capture the additional risk of abdominal obesity/metabolic syndrome.

For more detailed information on the metabolic syndrome and on global cardiometabolic risk, the reader is invited to consult several review papers [1-3].