Name Date Section
Are You at Risk for Cardiovascular Disease?  

Your chances of suffering an early heart attack or stroke depend on a variety of factors, many of which are under your control. The best time to identify your risk factors and change your behavior to lower your risk is when you are young. You can significantly affect your future health and quality of life if you adopt healthy behaviors. To help identify your risk factors, select the response for each risk category that best describes you.

1. Gender and Age
2. Heredity
3. Smoking
4. Environmental Tobacco Smoke
5. Blood Pressure (the average of the last three readings)
6. Total Cholesterol (the average of the last three readings)
7. HDL Cholesterol (the average of the last three readings)
8. Exercise
9. Diabetes
10. Weight
11. Stress
  Your Score:

*Pack-years can be calculated by multiplying the number of packs you smoked per day by the number of years you smoked. For example, if you smoked a pack and a half a day for 5 years, you would have smoked the equivalent of 1.5 x 5 = 7.5 pack-years.


Scoring

Refer to the list below to get an approximate rating of your risk of suffering an early heart attack or stroke.

Score Estimated Risk
Less than 20 Low risk
20-29 Moderate risk
30-45 High risk
Over 45 Extremely high risk

Whatever your score, examine your responses carefully to identify your CVD risk factors. Consider planning a behavior change strategy to lower your risk by changing your lifestyle.



INTERNET ACTIVITY
Use the World Wide Web to learn more about one of the controllable risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Choose one of the risk factors from the quiz in this worksheet--preferably one for which you have a high score. Find out more about the risk factor by visiting one of the sites listed in your text or by doing a Web search.

Risk factor:

Site(s) visited (URL):

What did you learn about the risk factor? Did you identify any strategies you can apply to your daily life? Any changes you can make in your current behavior to control or lessen the risk factor? List at least three practical strategies for reducing your risk.

Copyright © 2004 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.