The Extra "Indian" Cardiovascular Risk

For some time now, researchers and clinicians have been talking about the presence of an extra “Indian” risk for cardiovascular disease and deaths, over and above traditional risk factors and greater than the risk of non-Indians living in the same environment.

The MASALA study [1] in the past has found that there are significant differences in cardiovascular risk between South Asians and other populations living in the United States as have similar studies in other countries [2].

A new paper published on 12th July in Circulation [3] adds to the data on this subject. Aniruddh Patel and his colleagues analysed the UK Biobank cohort, and compared 8124 middle-aged individuals of South Asian ancestry to 449,349 people of European ancestry, for cardiovascular risk and events. A two-fold risk was seen at the end of 11 years in the South Asian population. More importantly, this risk was not captured by the AHA/ACC and Qrisk3 calculators, which are the best risk calculators available currently for Indians and South Asians.

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