Coronary Heart Disease Research Paper

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death worldwide since 1950s. In Malaysia, CHD is the number one cause of death which contributes 22.18% of deaths annually according to statistics from World Life Expectancy. CHD is the leading cause of death in United States for men and women. The statistics of The Heart Foundation have shown that every 33 seconds, someone in the United States dies from cardiovascular disease. For many years, CHD has been the leading cause of death globally. It is essential to know what is exactly about CHD. In general, CHD is caused by atherosclerosis which is a condition in which plaque built up in coronary arteries. Coronary arteries play an important role in carry oxygen-rich blood to our body. Plaques

In fact, there are some algorithms or risk calculators in expecting the probability of one to develop CHD. The most prominent one is the Framingham risk score which is a risk assessment calculator for CHD based on the Framingham heart study. The Framingham risk score is used to estimate the 10-year cardiovascular risk of an individual by including the risk factors of gender, age, total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, and cigarette use. It was proved to be useful. However, there are still some limitations exist. These limitations included for some of the sex-age groups in Framingham, the numbers of events are quite small. Therefore, the estimates of risk for those groups may lack precision. In addition, the Framingham risk score did not include some important risk factor such as fasting blood sugar level and occurrence of angina

At the early stage of CHD, most people exhibit some symptoms or discomfort but some people might not have any symptom at all. Commonly, the symptoms of CHD include chest pain (angina pectoris), short of breath, dizziness and irregular heartbeat. In this study, there were eight risk factors being considered in the risk function of CHD.

1.2.1 Age and Sex

In United States, CHD is the leading cause of death for both women and men. CHD is markedly more common in men than in women (Jousilahti, 1999). Previous study showed that the risk of developing CHD increases with age in both women and men, but the increase is sharper in women. According to Fang et al (2011), the prevalence of CHD was greatest among persons aged ≥65 years (19.8%), followed by those aged 45--64 years (7.1%) and those aged 18--44 years (1.2%) in 2010. In men, the risk for CHD increases after age 45. In women, the risk for CHD increases after age 55. The difference in coronary heart disease between genders is significant. Among middle-aged people, CHD is 2-5 times more common in men than in women (Jousilahti, 1999). However, CHD prevalence was greater among men (7.8%) than women (4.6%) in