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A new website helps patients prevent cardiovascular disease (CVD) by estimating their heart’s age.

The recently published Joint British Societies’ consensus recommendations for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (JBS3) extends the focus from targeting people at high risk of a heart attack or stroke within the next 10 years to also include those whose familial and lifestyle factors indicate a low short-term risk, but a high lifetime risk.

The JBS based the recommendations on growing evidence that a long pre-clinical phase precedes CVD and that most heart attacks and strokes occur in people at ‘intermediate’ risk.

So the recommendations include a risk calculator (www.jbs3risk.com) to help healthcare professionals and patients understand and tackle cumulative lifetime CVD risk.

For example, the calculator estimates the heart’s age based on current familial and lifestyle risk factors, and predicts how many more years the person can expect to live before a heart attack or stroke if they don’t take action.