Coronary heart disease Risk Scores and their correlation with Angiographic Severity Scores

Introduction: Though coronary heart disease risk scores have been developed to understand the risk of coronary heart disease in an individual, whether severity assessed by these scores really correlate with coronary angiographic severity has not been tested by properly designed studies. AIM: To study correlation between Framingham risk score, PROCAM score and Vascular age, individual components of lipid profile and the coronary atherosclerosis identified by coronary angiography severity scores. MATERIAL AND METHODS: Patients undergoing coronary angiogram for evaluation of IHD were study subjects. The patients were initially assessed by thorough history of presence of the CHD risk factors. They were examined, anthropometric data were collected, Fasting lipid profile was tested. Coronary angiography was done and severity scoring of coronary lesions was done by Jenkins scoring. RESULTS AND DATA ANALYSIS: A total of 36 male and 11 female patients who underwent coronary angiography were studied. The distribution of rest of the risk factors- BMI, Vascular age, PROCAM score and angiographic severity scores were found to have no significant gender difference. The coronary angiographic severity scores showed best correlation with Framingham risk scores for coronary heart disease (p=0.00), lesser correlation with the Vascular age of the individual (p=0.01), still lesser correlation with PROCAM scores (p=0.04) and no correlation with WHR and BMI values. Age (p=0.001) and the Framingham risk score were found to influence the angiographic severity scores most (p=0.000), PROCAM scores to a lesser extent (p=0.01). Individual components of lipids were not found to influence angiographic severity scores significantly. CONCLUSION: Framingham score for ischemic heart disease best correlates with angiographic severity scores. Individual components of lipid profile, BMI, Waist Hip Ratio do not correlate with coronary angiography severity scores.