NIH issues grant to develop new CV risk factor calculator

The National Institute on Aging has awarded a $2.2 million grant to investigators from Cleveland Clinic and The MetroHealth System to develop a new CV risk calculator that includes information about socioeconomic and neighborhood-related factors, according to a press release.

The award was given based on Jarrod Dalton, PhD, from Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, and colleagues’ recent paper on electronic health data from nearly 110,000 people. As Healio Internal Medicine previously reported, current models severely underestimate risk in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods.

“Poorer Americans are more likely to suffer from heart attacks and stroke, and are expected to live 10 fewer years than wealthier Americans,” Dalton said in the release. “Accurate risk assessment is critical for identifying high-risk patients so that prevention strategies or targeted therapies can be used. We aim to understand better the complexity of residential, economic and clinical factors and how they contribute to cardiovascular disease risk.”

The grant will help the investigators develop a comprehensive risk calculator that incorporates environmental and neighborhood-level characteristics.

The researchers will use data from Cleveland Clinic and MetroHealth patients and from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Our collaboration on this project will help health care providers identify which of their patients could have poor heart disease outcomes,” Adam T. Perzynski, PhD, senior instructor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University and bioscientific medical staff member at The MetroHealth System, said in the release. “By incorporating nonclinical factors related to where people live, we can enhance personalized approach and target more effective interventions for specific subpopulations, and ultimately reduce health disparities.”