Standard risk scores often miss people at high risk due to outdated calculations.
Welcome to the Younger Longer 28-Day Healthy Heart Challenge, a transformative podcast series designed to help you take control of your heart health and live a longer, healthier life. Over the next 28 days, we’ll guide you through a comprehensive journey covering key aspects of cardiovascular wellness—nutrition, exercise, stress management, medical awareness, and lifestyle choices.
Each daily episode is packed with expert insights from Dr. Warrick Bishop, best-selling author and cardiologist dedicated to preventing heart disease before it becomes a life-threatening issue. Using the latest science and practical strategies, this series empowers you to make heart-healthy choices and build habits that will support your well-being for years to come.
What You’ll Learn in the 28 Days:
✔ Understanding Your Heart – How it functions and why proactive care is essential.
✔ Heart-Healthy Nutrition – The best foods to fuel your cardiovascular system.
✔ Exercise & Movement – The role of physical activity in strengthening your heart.
✔ Stress & Mental Well-being – Managing stress and anxiety for a healthier heart.
✔ The Power of Sleep – How sleep quality impacts cardiovascular function.
✔ The Impact of Smoking & Alcohol – Making informed lifestyle changes.
✔ Supplements & Medical Insights – Understanding key nutrients and medical checkups.
✔ Advanced Heart Testing & Risk Factors – Going beyond traditional risk assessments.
✔ Sustaining Long-Term Heart Health Habits – Turning knowledge into action for lifelong benefits.
Why Listen?
- Get practical tips and science-backed advice you can apply immediately.
- Learn from real-world examples and medical expertise.
- Gain daily challenges to help you stay engaged and track progress.
- Take charge of your heart health in a simple, effective, and engaging way.
Your heart is your most vital organ, and the steps you take today will shape your future health. Whether you’re looking to prevent heart disease, manage risk factors, or simply improve your overall well-being, this 28-day challenge is your roadmap to a healthier, longer life.
Subscribe and start your journey today—because every heartbeat counts!
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Day 23, and we are on one of my favourite soapboxes—the role of traditional risk calculators, but most importantly, their limitations.
I really, really, really want you to pay attention here. This is super duper important. By the time you get through this podcast, my short video, and the resources—which I'm really going to ask you to check out this time—I hope you realise traditional risk factor calculators are really quite a waste of time. We've used them for years, but it's only because they've been the best that we've had.
To a large degree, these risk calculators work by observation—observing populations and the rates of events in people with different characteristics, and therefore taking those characteristics as associations to an event. Now, that might mean, for example, if we put some details into a risk calculator—say a man 50 to 55, his cholesterol is borderline average, his blood pressure is borderline average, his ECG is normal, he's not diabetic—his risk might be calculated at, say, 5 or 6% over the next 10 years.
Now, a couple of problems with this. When that risk calculator says the risk is 5 or 6% over the next 10 years, what it's really saying is if you take a hundred people with the same characteristics and follow those 100 people for 10 years, then 5 or 6 of those people will have a cardiac event. 94 won't, but 5 or 6 will.
A risk calculator doesn't tell you your risk. What it does is it tells the doctor and you the rate of events within a population of people just like you. Now, I don't have any patient who comes into my practice and says, "Dr. Bishop, I'd like to know the rate of event within the population I sit," because that's meaningless. What the person wants to know is, am I going to have an event?
And the reality is that for anyone over the next 5 to 10 years, their event rate will either be 0%—nothing will happen—or 100%. You can't have an event rate for an individual of 5 or 6%. So, a risk factor calculator does not calculate the risk of the individual if you're using those traditional risk factor associations—things like age, sex, blood pressure, smoking history, diabetic history, cholesterol levels, and so on.
This is why I'm so passionate about people getting a direct evaluation of the health of their arteries. Imagine if we could take that population of 100 people where we know 5 or 6 of them will have an event. And what if we could scan all those people and look at their arteries using their coronary artery calcium score and identify those who are truly at high risk or appear to be at high risk? We can implement therapy for those, and we can genuinely reassure the others.
So, when it comes to traditional risk factor calculators, they're not a bad idea. They were the best that we had a long time ago. My own feeling is we do much better bringing precision for an individual.
I'm going to leave you with that for now, and I really look forward to catching up with you tomorrow. In the meantime, live as well as possible for as long as possible.
Take care and bye for now.
Are You at Risk of a Sudden Heart Attack? How Healthy is Your Heart? Really?
Heart disease is the #1 killer in the Western World. In Australia, someone dies every 28 minutes from heart disease. That’s 51 people a day. In the US, someone has a heart attack every 40 SECONDS! Fortunately, many heart attacks are preventable. However, regular exercise and eating healthy are no guarantee you won’t succumb to this silent killer.
- 94% of Australians have at least One Risk Factor for heart disease.
- 59% of Australians have been Touched by heart disease.
- Yet only 3% of Australians have had a Full Heart-Health Assessment in the past 12 months.
Do the free heart check today at www.virtualheartcheck.com.au
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