The online tool assesses risks for heart disease, stroke, falls, cancer for postmenopausal women
THURSDAY, Oct. 3, 2019 (HealthDay News) — A new risk prediction calculator can make health risk predictions for several outcomes simultaneously in postmenopausal women, according to a study published online Sept. 16 in Menopause.
Haley Hedlin, Ph.D., from the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, and colleagues used demographic and medical data from 161,808 healthy and racially and ethnically diverse postmenopausal women (aged 50 to 79 years at baseline) participating in the Women’s Health Initiative. Data were used to develop and evaluate a calculator designed to predict individual risk for morbidity and mortality outcomes (all-cause mortality, adjudicated outcomes of health events [i.e., myocardial infarction, stroke, and hip fracture], and disease [lung, breast, and colorectal cancers]). The calculator uses 35 to 50 questions related to current and past health and family history to predict risk at five, 10, or 15 years.
The researchers found that the predictive validity of the calculator for a first event at five and 15 years, respectively, was 0.77 and 0.61 for myocardial infarction, 0.77 and 0.72 for stroke, 0.82 and 0.79 for lung cancer, 0.60 and 0.59 for breast cancer, 0.67 and 0.60 for colorectal cancer, 0.79 and 0.76 for hip fracture, and 0.74 and 0.72 for death using the C-statistic in the test dataset.
“Development of this tool is a first step toward enabling women to prioritize interventions that may decrease these risks,” the authors write.
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