Life Style Factors and their Relationship with Cardiovascular diseases

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) such as hypertension and ischemic heart diseases cause 35 to 40% of deaths every year in Pakistan. Several life style factors such as smoking, dietary habits, lack of exercise, mental stress, body habitus (i.e., BMI and waist), personal habits (i.e., dietary habits, sleep and smoking) and clinical conditions (i.e., diabetes, dyslipidemia and hypertension) have been shown to be strongly associated with the etiology of CVD. Epidemiological studies in Pakistan have shown poor adherence of people to healthy life style and lack of knowledge of adopting alternatively healthy habits. There are well validated cardiovascular risk estimation tools that can predict the probability of future cardiac events. The existing tools are based on laboratory investigation of biochemical tests. There is no widely acceptable tool available that predicts the CVD risk based on life style factors. This research aims to develop alternative CVD risk estimation model based on life style factors and physical attributes without conducting any clinical test by using QRISK model as the gold standard. In this research, 160 subjects participated in the case cross over design study to find out the risk probability based on BMI (body mass index), waist circumference, physical activities (i.e., stamina, strength, flexibility and posture), smoking, general illnesses, dietary intake, stress and physical characteristics as predictors and thereby indirectly predicting the future cardiovascular disease events risk. Principal component analysis (PCA), bivariate correlations and Regression analysis were used to assess the relationship among predictor variables and cardiovascular risk score. Four predictors, i.e., Chronological age, waist circumference, BMI (body mass index) and strength showed significant effect on cardiovascular disease risk probability. Multiple-linear regression was applied on features extracted through PCA to create a prediction model/equation of QRISK Cardiovascular Probability. CVD risk can be measured up-to 72.9% accuracy with the new model created in this research. Very few heart patients were part of this study. Mostly people were healthy or at medium risk of cardiovascular diseases. All participants were male, so a large scale study can be conducted by including male and female to further prove the results.