Calculating your heart attack risk

The original tool for estimating an individual's heart attack risk was the Framingham score. It uses six items — age, gender, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, smoking status, and systolic blood pressure — to calculate the odds of having a heart attack over the next 10 years.

An interdisciplinary team at the Harvard School of Public Health built a more extensive tool called Your Disease Risk (now housed at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis). In addition to gauging your chances of having a heart attack — and offering tips on reducing your risk — it does the same thing for having a stroke or developing cancer, diabetes, or osteoporosis.