Know Your Odds for Heart Failure

June 9 -- MONDAY, June 8 (HealthDay News) -- Avoiding four key risk factors -- overweight, smoking, hypertension and diabetes -- can go a long way to keeping you safe from a major killer, heart failure.

So finds new research based on data from the landmark Framingham Heart Study. Another study, also published June 9 in the online edition of Circulation, outlines a new means of predicting a person's 30-year odds of developing heart failure.

Heart failure affects an estimated 5 million Americans and is involved in 300,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the American Heart Association.

It's not news that excess weight, smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes can all raise heart failure risk, said Dr. Ramachandran S. Vasan, a senior investigator at the Framingham Heart Study and professor of medicine at Boston University, who co-authored the two studies. But the depth of the research offered here is new, he said.

The look back at Framingham statistics, for example, "goes back over 16 years. This long duration of follow-up provides a far more robust analysis," Vasan said.

The Framingham effort began with an examination of more than 4,200 Framingham residents in the 1970s, whose average age was then 45. Vasan and his team then added in data on the children of the original participants. Follow-up exams were done every four years to see how closely the four risk factors correlated with a progressive thickening of the heart's left ventricle, a blood-pumping chamber. This gradual thickening of heart muscle contributes greatly to heart failure.

The 16-year analysis found that women had a greater and steeper rate of left ventricular thickening, and thus a higher risk of heart failure, than men. It also showed a very close relationship between the four risk factors and a thickening of the heart chamber wall.

In fact, "people with fewer risk factors had almost no increase in left ventricular mass with age," Vasan noted. "People who had more risk factors had a steeper increase in left ventricular mass with age."