The National Cholesterol Education Program III scoring system for CHD risk estimation cannot be used with European recommendations

To target statin therapy effectively in primary coronary heart disease (CHD) prevention, recommendations increasingly advocate the assessment of absolute CHD risk. Using methods from two recent sets of national recommendations, we estimated absolute CHD risk in 412 men and women whose general practitioners requested it on clinical grounds. Substantially fewer men and women had CHD risk exceeding 15%, 20% and 30% over 10 years with the National Cholesterol Education Program III (NCEP III) scoring system than with the Joint British charts. The latter agreed closely with the 1990 version of the Framingham risk equations.