Cardiovascular risk assessment with SCORE2 and targeted health dialogues in primary care patients with mental illness.

Plain-language summary

This study looked at whether a standard heart-risk calculator misses important risks in people with mental illness, who tend to get heart disease more often. SCORE2 is a widely used European tool that estimates your chance of a heart attack or stroke over the next ten years from a few numbers like age, blood pressure, cholesterol, and smoking. Researchers ran SCORE2 on 120 primary-care patients aged 40 to 69 with mental illness, then also did a fuller check of everyday habits, weight, waist size, diet, activity, alcohol, sleep, and blood sugar. Most of the men, about 86 percent, already scored at moderate or high risk, and the fuller check turned up extra risk factors the calculator alone did not catch.

Key findings

• Most men (86.5%) and one-third of women (35.5%) with mental illness had moderate or high heart disease risk by SCORE2.
• Even patients with low SCORE2 risk often had unhealthy habits like poor diet or inactivity that THD identified.
• THD may help find more modifiable risks than SCORE2 alone in this group.