Who is at risk of a coronary?

The Joint Working Party of the Royal College of Physicians and the British Cardiac Society have recently given advice to medical practitioners about preventing coronary heart disease. We have formulated an easy method by which the medical practitioner may apply a rule to identify individuals who are at moderate to high risk of developing the disease. The simple arithmetic requires finding the product of four numbers and can be done with a pocket calculator costing less than pound 10. The four numbers correspond to known values of the four risk variables--age, systolic blood pressure, serum cholesterol levels, and smoking--for a given individual. Tables of relative risk components for men aged 40 to 59 years for coronary heart disease defined by hard criteria (fatal or definite myocardial infarction) have been drawn up. The overall effect of the four risk variables is multiplicative so that some men aged 40 are at far greater risk than some of 55 year olds.