Abstract
The World Health Organisation and International Society of Hypertension (WHO/ISH) cardiovascular disease (CVD)risk assessment charts have been implemented in many low- and middle-income countries as part of the WHO Package of Essential Non-Communicable Disease (PEN) Interventions for Primary Health Care in Low-Resource settings. Evaluation of the WHO/ISH cardiovascular risk charts and their use is a key priority and since they only existed in paper or PDF formats, we developed an R implementation of the charts for all epidemiological subregions of the world. The main strengths of this implementation are that it is built in a free, open-source, coding language with simple syntax, can be downloaded from github as a package ("whoishRisk"), and can be used with a standard computer.
Highlights
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide, including in many low-and-middle income countries (LMIC)[1,2]
Through our experience collaborating with LMIC with the implementation of World Health Organisation (WHO) Package of Essential NCD (PEN), we identified a common need for an open-source tool to facilitate the implementation of WHO/International Society of Hypertension (ISH) risk charts and operational research of WHO PEN at a population level
The package contains a single function, WHO_ISH_Risk(), which calculates the WHO/ISH CVD risk score for any epidemiological subregion of the world based on the parameter values passed to it
Summary
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide, including in many low-and-middle income countries (LMIC)[1,2]. Validation A MatLab implementation of WHO/ISH risk charts for epidemiological subregion SEAR D had been previously reported[8]. In 2007 the WHO and the International Society of Hypertension (ISH) published the WHO/ISH CVD risk charts for all WHO epidemiological subregions of the world[4] These charts are to be used as part of the WHO’s Package of Essential NCD (PEN) Interventions for Primary Health Care in Low-Resource Settings in jurisdictions that do not have their own population-derived risk assessment algorithms. While these charts are a good resource for many health systems, little is known about their validity[5]. It is important that jurisdictions that implement these charts conduct operational research and attempt to validate and optimise them for their setting
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