This project was inspired by a personal experience I had--I put my numbers into a spreadsheet provided by the American Heart Association and found I had a 50% lifetime risk of a heart attack. Yikes!
I've gone to regular check-ups all my life and always been a little outside of the cholesterol guidelines, but I never knew how seriously to take that. I didn't know you could translate those numbers into percentage chance of getting a heart attack, whether I was "high" or "low," or how much I could improve by making lifestyle changes.
I figured there must be other people out there who are similarly ignorant about their own health, so I built this. (Please don't take this as a substitute for going to the doctor; there are all sorts of things your doctor can tell you that a web page can't. This is just for education!)
I've never really understood what life time risk means...
Does 50% mean I'll get a heart attack in my 40s, or mean I'll get one in my 80s instead of getting cancer, etc.
What I'm getting at is that if nothing else kills you, eventually your heart will fail. Shouldn't it be possible to decrease my heart attack risk by increasing my cancer risk?
These models often compensate for competing risks of death—if you're curious, look up "Cox proportional hazard" to understand some of the math behind this.
Your meta point is a good one—I would like to see a model that predicts either your total lifespan, or probability of living to (say) 80 years of age heart attack-free. Perhaps I'll try to get access to the raw Framingham data and build a model to do that.
(For this particular page, I just bootstrapped from the existing medical research, which, while it has its limitations, has at least been thoroughly studied.)
For those purposes, do you know how smoking marijuana maps to smoking cigarette? E.g. is 1 "dose" of pot = 1 cigarette? 10 cigarettes? Or does it not map at all?
Real life doctor here. Your question sounds simple, but the answer is complex. The heart disease risk from smoking probably stems from damage to blood vessels caused by toxins generated in the tobacco burning. "Toxins" is really the best word here, even though it's so general. I use it to encompass thousands of different chemicals like free radicals, known carcinogens, etc.
Current thinking is the body repairs that damage with clots and cholesterol. But, these repairs accumulate over time to occlude a blood vessel (atherosclerosis). If red blood cells can't get through, oxygen can't either, and heart cells downstream to the occlusion will die in minutes to hours.
Marijuana most likely generates a significant amount of toxins as well. However, marijuana smokers generally smoke less than cigarette smokers. Given that heart disease and cancer risk increases with the amount smoked, it would be reasonable to assume marijuana smokers are much less at risk (though the risk is nonzero). But, we don't have a clear conversion between marijuana and cigarette smoke yet. You may also consider that marijuana may be contaminated with other plants or chemicals.
Electronic cigarettes are possibly more safe than non-e cigarettes in terms of cancer risk (this is theoretical as no significant study has been done yet). However, some in vitro (cellular) research suggests nicotine may play a role in atherosclerosis discussed above. Also, nicotine can precipitate a heart attack if a heart is already diseased.
Just want to point out that a cursory search says marijuana deposits about 4x the amount of tar in the lungs as tobacco.
Unless it contributes to increased addiction, the manufacturers generally try and reduce the unhealthy components of the cigarettes - making them more palatable and keeping the addicts alive for longer so they can make more money off of them. There's really no such effort with marijuana as it stands today.
I'm totally unqualified to make this statement, but I'd venture a guess that most of the 'toxins' that are natural byproducts of combustion - not just the tar - are present in significantly higher amounts in marijuana.
Sticking to the 4:1 ratio, someone who smokes 5 joints a day is basically a pack a day smoker.
Damage accumulates with normal wear and tear, giving more chances for atherosclerosis to form. Cholesterol matters in otherwise healthy patients particularly as they age.
Free radicals are parts of a chemical structure that are unpaired and therefore super reactive. The reason they are linked to cancer is they can easily form bonds with molecules that they shouldn't be bonding with and cause crazy things to happen.
Pot itself has no known health detriments. Smoking marihuana, however, does impart some of the risks of smoking, but not nearly the same. I don't know if it's possible to reach the same level of damage to your lungs with pot as you would with cigarettes.
You can't say this. There's a possibility that cannabis causes mental health problems in some people who don't have underlying disease. There's a stronger possibility that cannabis triggers mental illness in people who do have underlying disease but who would not otherwise have had an episode.
It is irresponsible to suggest that cannabis is harm free.
People like you do great harm to campaigns that aim to legalise drugs. Please stop.
Your response has the same logic that living gives you cancer. In all my years of medicine I have not seen this clear link you establish between mental illness and marijuana. I'd be very interested in learning more about it, if you have some resources for me to look at it.
I did not suggest that cannabis is harm free. I stated we cannot explicitly identified marijuana as the cause of illness.
How am I doing "great harm" to campaigns aiming to legalize drugs? (That's an honest question, I'm not quite processing your viewpoint on my argument, and am actually interested in your response.)
> The report says that the constituents of cannabis smoke are similar to those of tobacco smoke apart from the presence of THC (which is only in cannabis) or nicotine (which is only in tobacco). This means that cannabis smoke has the same carcinogens (substances that cause cancer) as tobacco smoke, although concentrations of these may be up to 50% higher. Like tobacco, cannabis also contains toxic carbon monoxide
Saying that this is equivalent to "no known health risks" is intellectually dishonest.
He did say "no known" detriments and from all I've read and heard, that remains true. There's correlations and linkage suggestions flung all around in the medical industry, but until proven, I think it's perfectly alright to say "no known" whatever.
Besides the patronizing of the parent post, I do think your argument is valid. Mostly since you use the phrases "stronger possibility." But again, without clinical proof, your argument is only as good as parent's.
"Teens who were heavy marijuana users -- smoking it daily for about three years -- had abnormal changes in their brain structures related to working memory and performed poorly on memory tasks, reports a new Northwestern Medicine® study."
"The brain abnormalities and memory problems were observed during the individuals’ early twenties, two years after they stopped smoking marijuana, which could indicate the long-term effects of chronic use. Memory-related structures in their brains appeared to shrink and collapse inward, possibly reflecting a decrease in neurons."
> Smoking marihuana, however, does impart some of the risks of smoking, but not nearly the same. I don't know if it's possible to reach the same level of damage to your lungs with pot as you would with cigarettes.
This. I am constantly being tagged as overweight and high risk because of my BMI (5'10" and 175-180lbs but I am very active and the weight is from muscle rather than fat).
I haven't seen one yet, but I highly recommend knowing your cholesterol numbers since those will give a much more accurate result--both BMI and ABSI are very coarse-grained measures of what's likely to be happening inside your arteries.
So now I'm curious; I'd always thought obesity was itself a risk factor, but your calculator does not consider it.
Is the "problem" with obesity only its impact on blood pressure and cholesterol? Or does obesity also increase risk in other ways in addition to worsening those factors?
BMI is archaic and a "one shoe fits all" metric. That doesn't mean that BMI is wrong - just that you should do more detailed diagnoses with your doctor to determine your health.
If BMI is saying you're obese, then get a comprehensive metabolic panel and lipid panel with your PCP, and go from there.
BMI is itself fine for my line of questioning, because I'm curious as to whether excess quantities of fat impact cardiovascular risk in the general case. Determining things like this is exactly the use case of BMI, since across large sample sizes it is a reasonable proxy for what we are really interested in (i.e. how much excess fat the participants have).
Mainly: I'm curious mostly about whether excess body fat on its own impacts cardiovascular health, or whether it does so only indirectly by increasing the risk factors this calculator uses.
Obesity seems to impact long-term cardiovascular health only through the other numbers--i.e., raising your blood pressure and lipids. In the Framingham 30-year risk study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19506114), they tried adding BMI to the risk model, but it didn't add any predictive value. But they used it to create a very approximate risk model for people who don't know their biomarkers.
Also note that you can appear perfectly thin, but have high blood pressure and cholesterol, and thus be at risk! So know your numbers. A lot of health is only revealed by what's going on within your body.
The back-and-forth of this discussion about BMI is entirely predictable, but doesn't it sort of miss the point? Isn't it possible -- and I mean this sincerely, even though it's wildly simplistic -- to just look at a human and determine if they're carrying around excess fat?
A lot of times when I hear people saying that BMI doesn't account for how much they exercise, I'm looking at the person saying it and they appear unfit. On the other hand, do we need BMI to tell us that a fit person is fit? What am I missing here?
Doesn't matter, you still fit into many of the same statistical categories as other people listed as overweight by BMI. It is unlikely your muscle mass is solely responsible for you being listed as overweight
This is really just a spreadsheet still with a graph at the end. Would be more valuable if you actually show the ways to raise your HDL, and how to lower blood pressure, etc. Perhaps grab some data from some reputable health websites.
Is there any way to get to that without entering the 4 numbers? I don't have my last cholesterol stats in front of me, but I'm still curious to see what suggestions it makes.
It doesn't seem productive to hide away the advice part of it; and in particular it would be sensible to at least hint that there's more than just a risk percentage to come after you enter the 4 numbers (which, let's face it, most people won't know off the top of their heads!).
...
Okay, I got through with faked numbers; I just put 150, 60, and 120. Note: the results aren't all updated correctly if you change the numbers at the top and recalculate. E.g., this line in particular has different numbers than the rest: "You're doing pretty well! Your risk of heart disease is 18%. With ideal risk factors, your risk would be 18%."
My main complaints about the results:
There's no obvious reason it should to demand my email address before it'll share advice on how to improve my health (on whatever figure happens to be too low/high).
From the page: "First, enter your email. We'll use it to send you a copy of your report and follow up on the actions identified. No spam."
Eh... This sounds too much like I'm about to hit the part in the funnel where they start trying to sell me something. Right? "Enter your email for the free whitepaper" means "sign up for our sales email stream".
I wouldn't have any use for a copy of the report buried in my email history; if they actually want me to keep a copy for reference, that's what a PDF download is for.
Followup on the actions suggested sounds like a potentially useful feature which would legitimately need my email -- but right now, I don't yet know what kind of advice it's going to give (what if the next page reveals that it's hawking AcmeCorp Super-HDL-Booster Supplements?), I don't know if I want followup before they explain what that would entail, and so this is where I stop.
The visible front of the website is also actively anonymous -- the page is copyright "Heart" (?), all contact info even in the privacy policy is anonymous (just this domain name and a PO box). The PP itself is clearly boilerplate edited to match the site (including some odd errors; e.g., I caught this near the top: "We implement a variety of security measures enters, submits, or accesses their information to maintain the safety of your personal information.") -- so it talks about purchases, but I'm not sure that reveals anything at all.
But I really do think it's important to connect online efforts with real people. If this is a spare time project intending to help other people, great; take credit for it! -- to be straightforward that it's not provided by a doctor (okay), but also that it's not provided by a shady snake oil company that's redirecting you into its sales funnel.
I notice the creator is hiding, and I immediately want to know why.
I came here to say exactly the same. Maybe you could add a radio button, or better, try to get geographical information from the IP and display the units accordingly (but don't forget about the other two countries that still use the imperial system, the USA aren't yet alone ;) ).
In any case I'm glad that I'm at relatively low risk despite being overweight (but a little less each day). I guess that low blood pressure and zero smoking are that good.
My caffeine intake is also zero (Ok, I think that cocoa powder has some, so not literal zero). I wonder if that has any effect on my risk, maybe something indirect through blood pressure.
If you're officially "overweight", and not any category of obese (at least by BMI), you might be better off not trying to lose any more. There seems to be a growing consensus that the best all-causes mortality rate is actually for people in the overweight category [1]. Yes, correlation and causation and all relevant caveats apply. Personally, and IANAMD, I think as long as the weight is not causing noticeable quality of life drops, you're better off not stressing about it, and just trying to live life comfortably. Eat well and exercise, but if your body doesn't want to give up that extra reserve, don't force it.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23280227 --- n.b. I haven't actually read the article, but I'm assuming the abstract isn't lying when it says "overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality".
It considers me to have a high BMI - yet my body fat is relatively low. I was lighter and fatter until I started working out; now I am heavier and slimmer. My clothes are generally looser, except my shirts and jackets, which are snugger around the chest.
Considering that, overall, my doctor believes I had a low risk of cardiovascular disease before I started exercising regularly, and now believes my risk to be lower, I take the risk numbers with a grain of salt - and a dab of butter.
Speaking of fat, as others have noted, total cholesterol may be meaningless. If I told you my total, you'd likely call an ambulance. But my triglycerides are low and my HDL/tri and HDL/total ratios are so good they are silly.
Based on everything my doctor knows - and she's scientifically minded, curious, and thorough, traits unusual in family doctors AFAICT - my risk of cardiovascular disease is in the low single digits.
Yet this test tells me my best case is mid 30s and my current close to 50.
Yeah, uh huh, I'm going to take medical advice from an app prepared by someone who lived an anecdote.
(No disrespect intended. Our personal experiences tend to not be transferable, no matter how much we learn about our case, because we learn about our case - not about all cases, with a dash of probability and a hint of objectivity.)
Obviously metric, since that's what most of the world uses abd you're cutting yourself from a large chunk of your potential audience. The cholesterol measures are already metric.
The site is going to be limited to the US anyway. The data is calculated from a US population for US lifestyles. And the racial information is US-centric. Does 'Asian' mean Korean, Indian, or Palestinian? Is an African African-American? Even if they're Moroccan? The medical term for that genotype is 'negro', but that word has far too much baggage to be used with a primarily US audience.
And making the units even more alien doesn't help when you have to look them up and after an exhausting search find out they are imperial/metric and have to convert further.
Well I certainly know one of two bits of information this app can use to make its guess but I still can't use it because.. well.. you know. Defeats the purpose altogether.
Yeah you can convert between units. But as soon as I saw imperial units I just closed the site. If you want to publish something on the Internet you have to take into account that users will be way too lazy to convert. And I don't want to support imperial measurements in any way or form so I would rather not use a site or a service that uses them.
That table is for glucose only. It would be the same for cholesterol if and only if a glucose molecule weighs the same as a cholesterol molecule (is it even possible to do that conversion, given that there are at least two different kinds of cholesterol, with different atomic masses?)
The models tend to be close to equivalent in their inputs: either total or LDL cholesterol (small-particle LDL is the one that drives atherosclerosis, but if the model includes HDL cholesterol, then it doesn't make a big difference in accuracy whether the other variable is total or LDL cholesterol), HDL cholesterol (seems to cause a protective effect, although randomized trials of HDL-boosting drugs haven't shown improvements, so may not be causal), blood pressure, and smoking. People also sometimes include newer biomarkers like triglycerides or hs-CRP, but they don't consistently show accuracy gains (LDL, triglycerides, and hs-CRP are highly correlated, so each one individually is a good predictor but having all three doesn't necessarily give you a more accurate model).
There's still a lot of active research to find out which of these variables are causal and which are merely associated with heart disease. For example, LDL-lowering drugs like statins do reduce the risk of heart attacks in randomized trials.
TC is less predictive than HDL:Triglyceride ratio by a significant margin. people with "high" TC of 200-220 and a good HDL:Trig ratio outlive those with "excellent" TC levels.
There are cases where BP matters less as well. For example the cochrane review on sodium consumption indicated that while lowering sodium intake aggressively did successfully lower BP, it resulted in worse mortality.
Have a citation for a risk model that uses triglycerides?
"Predicting the Thirty-year Risk of Cardiovascular Disease: The Framingham Heart Study" (http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/24/3078.abstract) reported that triglycerides were not statistically significant when added to a model that already contains total and HDL cholesterol:
"Standard CVD risk factors (male sex, age, SBP, antihypertensive treatment, total and HDL cholesterol, smoking and diabetes) were highly significant (0.01 level) in the multivariable model. DBP and triglycerides were not statistically significant and inclusion of LDL in place of total cholesterol did not improve model performance."
Interesting, thanks for the citation I hadn't seen it before. It does look like pretty solid evidence, so I'm less sure of the triglyceride hypothesis than I was before.
There is significant overlap in the explanatory power of these variables because they are not independent. So it is possible that "high" cholesterol has covariance with triglyceride:HDL ratio in the majority of the population sample (seems likely). In that case we should see people with "high" TC still have better mortality outcomes. Which we do see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11502313
But like I said, the Framingham study does seem like reasonable evidence. I'll look over the entire thing later.
Sounds good. What I've mostly seen is that LDL, total cholesterol, and triglycerides seem to be highly correlated, and adding in any one of those three (assuming you also have HDL) gives the same accuracy, so the risk modelers usually just stick with total cholesterol since more patients know it.
For ratios, this particular model is log-linear:
risk = b^(w0 + w1log(cholesterol) + w2log(hdl) + ...)
So adding in variables to represent ratios would change the coefficients, but not the final risks.
For that last one, the "low cholesterol" bucket they allude to is people whose total cholesterol is <180 mg/dL. 180 mg/dL is exceptionally low, particularly for an older population. There's also a potential confounding effect when you study only total cholesterol (ignoring HDL)--your "low cholesterol" group of people includes a disproportionate number whose HDL ("good") cholesterol is also low, and who thus are actually at a high risk of heart disease according to models like the Framingham one.
Right now QRISK2 is considered the most accurate when it comes to predicting morbidity and mortality of cardiovascular events. This calculator is great, but missing one important factor if either of your first degree parents had a heart attack before 60 then you are at greater risk. This mostly ties into things like homocystine levels, hrcp, and LDL particle size, but its a good ballpark for the genetic variation.
My advice get genetically screened if you are worried and make changes. If you carry alterations on the 9p21 chromosome chances are you are at higher risk. If so you can simply eat more fruit and vegetables this has been shown in multiple studies to dramatically lower rates independent of other factors.
I was thinking the exact opposite after having plugged in all sorts of crazy numbers to see how they affect the results (incidentally the highest total cholesterol it accepts is 400, way too low for anyone who regularly cooks with coconut oil IMHO).
If you don't enter height or weight into "debug my life" it says: "Your current BMI is 23, which is in the healthy range" instead of "you didn't give us what we need to calculate your BMI".
The current risk in the graph doesn't update when I change a value and click Calculate My Risk again; e.g., if I calculate with blood pressure blank then recalculate with it set to 130.
I closed the page immediately upon seeing total cholesterol. Being on a ketogenic diet, it'd probably tell me I'm at risk because the diet increases both HDL and big LDL particles (the harmless kind). Total cholesterol is meaningless.
In fact, there was some study (can't find the link) showing that people with moderately higher LDL lived longer than people with LDL that's in norm. I'm also on a ketogenic diet and my HDL is over 100, triglycerides below 70, and LDL is a bit high, but total cholesterol is way high due to high HDL. It's totally unscientific to use LDL given it includes HDL and the higher the HDL, the better with no set up limit (unlike many markers). HDL/triglycerides is the only meaningful ratio in the standard lipid profile. Also, there's some truth in doing subfractioning of LDL, which almost nobody does as it's expensive and not part of official lipid profile testing as far as I know.
Edit: Grammar.
> It's totally unscientific to use LDL given it includes HDL
I agree that total LDL is not a good indicator unless you do subfractioning, but I think you meant total cholesterol here, as LDL does not include HDL (that wouldn't even make sense!).
Yes, I made a mistake, but you got my point. As you may have in-norm LDL and very HDL and then your TC will be in the danger zone, which doesn't make any sense.
Interesting, but not exactly new.
This has been promoted in various ways in the past (http://www.cvriskcalculator.com/ - which is updated with recent BP management data as well)
There was also that thing in the news about some effects of smoking being mitigated if one quit by about age ~32. Still I wonder (as someone who previously smoked) how there couldn't be some kind of damage after several years of smoking
The sensitivity analysis being displayed automatically is a nice feature, as it immediately shows the effects of changes. That's a clever bit of UI that most similar apps don't have.
Actually, it's clipped _and_ it's overlapping with 'current risk'. I also see the same on the other end of the chart with blood pressure: http://imgur.com/jaJHErm
(I'm also unclear as to why '90' systolic blood pressure is at an unexpected end of the graph, but...)
This seems pretty neat. Are you considering turning this into a startup, then? X for Y pitch of "machine learning for personal health"? I say go for it. :D
Unfortunately it's hard but true. I'm on a diet too and it's hard to keep it up. But the benefits of losing weight are pretty clear--it basically improves all four of your numbers except for smoking. :)
Feel free to email me if you have thoughts on what you've tried so far, and what you'd like to see ideally. Address is in my profile.
Ah, I wish I had seen that challenge before submissions closed!
The risk models for heart disease are simple enough that I just implemented them in Javascript based on the Framingham papers, although I did talk with one of the risk modelers at Archimedes to understand which models to use.
These numbers seem slightly off, or the way they are presented is a bit confusing:
"Your lifetime risk of heart disease is 56% as of today. You can reduce that to 38% if you ... That would make your risk about 34% lower. Not too shabby!"
I see what you are saying. I stand by the second part of my statement though. Presenting a percentage you can lower a percentage can (and just did) lead to some confusion.
It does when calculating your 10-year-risk, but not for lifetime risk. I'd like to add a feature to show you both 10-year and lifetime risks, but for now, the NIH has a 10-year-risk calculator:
http://cvdrisk.nhlbi.nih.gov/
For most people, the 10-year-risk becomes important in your 50's, 60's, and 70's and is used to guide treatment for e.g., statin therapy or anti-hypertensive medication.
If you're 30, your 10-year-risk is generally very low even if you treat your body terribly. :) So part of the motivation for showing the lifetime risk is to get people thinking about how to optimize their health for their life, since by the time your 10-year-risk is significant it's often too late to change your habits for diet/exercise.
"Cholesterol" tends to get used to mean two different things, and even otherwise clear writers like Gary Taubes don't always explicitly denote which one they mean:
1) the amount of cholesterol in your blood, which is mostly produced by your liver. I.e., if my blood cholesterol is 300 mg/dL, should I be worried?
2) cholesterol in your diet. I.e., should you avoid eggs?
I'd say the scientific consensus is that blood cholesterol (particularly small-particle LDL) drives heart disease, but cholesterol (or saturated fat) in your diet doesn't drive blood cholesterol (<10% effect).
So low-fat/high-carb diets were a fallacy and are not "heart-healthy," it's fine to eat eggs, but you should still try to reduce your LDL cholesterol if it's high and boost your HDL cholesterol if it's low.
>I'd say the scientific consensus is that blood cholesterol (particularly small-particle LDL) drives heart disease
Blood cholesterol is a natural component of blood and is synthesized by all animal cells because it is an essential component of cell membranes. If you had no cholesterol in your blood you would be seriously ill.
Abnormal levels of cholesterol are associated with heart disease but it is not clear if they are the prime cause. The heart disease and abnormal cholesterol may both be caused by something else. There is evidence that excessive activation of the bodies inflammatory system may be more of a root cause.
> [..] but cholesterol (or saturated fat) in your diet
> doesn't drive blood cholesterol (<10% effect).
> [..] it's fine to eat eggs, but you should still try
> to reduce your LDL cholesterol if it's high and boost
> your HDL cholesterol if it's low.
This is highly interesting but I'm confused. Do you mean that diet doesn't matter when it comes to blood cholesterol
and the LDL/HDL ratio can only be affected by medication or that only the ratio but not overall blood cholesterol can be influenced by the diet?
> Do you mean that diet doesn't matter when it comes to blood cholesterol
Diet matters a lot. Apparently, it has been shown that for some people, milk fat in the diet correlates strongly with serum (blood) levels of cholesterol.
However, the effect of cholesterol in your diet seems to have little to no effect on your serum levels.
Serum cholesterol is actually pretty important: It is the precursor to Vitamin D (the other ingredient being sunlight exposure). For sure, it is an indicator of trouble, but it is unclear if it actually causes trouble itself or is part of the body's attempt to make things right.
Statins reduce cholesterol, and reduce the incidence of heart attacks, but they either increase or do not affect all-cause mortality (depending on which study you look at).
The science is far from settled on this, despite what most medical professionals would have you believe.
I would like to believe that before a major push from government and health organizations to encourage people to eat less fat, there was strong evidence that reducing dietary fat and cholesterol correlated with significant health improvement.
I would like to believe it, but I can't seem to find that strong evidence anywhere.
I would like to believe it, but I can't seem to find that strong evidence anywhere.
That’s because it doesn’t exist, of course. We have been tragically misled for about 30 years.
This is N=2 but my wife and I switched to a low-carb/high-fat diet last summer and we are both at our ideal weight, higher energy than we have had in many years, and feeling absolutely fantastic. I think this is where the current metabolic science is taking us.
Tragically misled might even be an understatement. The US Government is probably going to end up having killed hundreds of thousands of people through dangerously bad dietary guidelines and the impact they have across the culture over a generation.
Their recommendation for consuming 5-12 servings of breads, cereals, pasta, 'whole grains' per day is like telling people they need to drink more soda.
So if I have relatively more muscle mass compared to my height, that means that I am at a higher chance for getting a heart attack? Well, that could be the case for all I know.
This project was inspired by a personal experience I had--I put my numbers into a spreadsheet provided by the American Heart Association and found I had a 50% lifetime risk of a heart attack. Yikes!
I've gone to regular check-ups all my life and always been a little outside of the cholesterol guidelines, but I never knew how seriously to take that. I didn't know you could translate those numbers into percentage chance of getting a heart attack, whether I was "high" or "low," or how much I could improve by making lifestyle changes.
I figured there must be other people out there who are similarly ignorant about their own health, so I built this. (Please don't take this as a substitute for going to the doctor; there are all sorts of things your doctor can tell you that a web page can't. This is just for education!)
Please let me know if you have questions!