ABSTRACT
Risk calculators within the cardiovascular community have increased exponentially over recent decades, aided by the technology to create and maintain large databases, and hand-held devices to compute them. Users include healthcare workers ranging from medical students to allied health professionals, to physicians standardising their assessment criteria, and to specialists conducting clinical trials.
There are now well over a hundred risk calculators for coronary heart disease or cardiovascular disease alone, and many hundreds of calculators to assess the many facets of cardiology practice. It is impossible to evaluate all of these risk scores or calculators in one chapter, but this treatise provides an introduction to some of the more commonly used calculators, and serves as a guide to their application.
