[Identification of subjects at high coronary risk in the Roman Project of Coronary Heart Disease Prevention (author's transl)].

In the Roman Project of Coronary Heart Disease Prevention two different techniques were employed for the identification of individuals at high coronary risk within the treatment groups of the Project. The "risk score" is a simple additive system developed by the working groups of WHO, while the "multiple logistic function" is a complex mathematical model of multivariate analysis. Both of them consider 5 risk factors (age, systolic blood pressure, serum cholesterol, smoking habits and physical activity at work) and are applied for the identification of individuals belonging to the upper 20% of a risk rank list. The two techniques apparently provide similar predictive performances when applied to epidemiological prospective material collected in other studies where the morbid events are already known. When employed in the study population groups they identify, as high risk individuals, different subgroups of population, which overlap only partially. On the basis of theoretical and practical considerations, it has been decided to employ both techniques and to extend, as a consequence, the proportion of high risk individual, eligible for individual treatment, from 20% to about 30% of the total.