Do you know how much risk you are at from Coronary Heart Disease over the next ten years? You can bet that your GP does, and he will be using that value to help him decide what treatment regime to give you.

Interestingly, you can use the same tool that your GP uses to work out your risk yourself and monitor your progress in terms of risk factor. You will need to know just a few values, and you should have these and they will be checked in your annual review, just make a note of them. You want:
HbA1c
Systolic BP Value
HDL Cholesterol
Total Cholesterol

and then a few things that you will know,
are you a smoker (yes if you have smoked within last 5 years)
age
length of time diabetic in years.

Then go to the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology & Metabolism website and download the analysis tool. When you have run it (it was version 2.0 when I used it), you can enter your values and get your risk factor. I put in the values when I was first diagnosed, and again now after two years of treatment. I have gone down in risk of CHD.

When I was first diagnosed diabetic, the values of the key indicators gave me a CHD risk factor of 16% with a 13% chance that it would be fatal, and a 2.3% chance of a stroke, 0.5% chance it would be fatal.


Now two years on, and after two years of treatment by by GP, my risk factor has changed quite significantly. My CHD risk is down to 1.9% with a 0.7% chance it'll be fatal, and a 1.7% chance of a stroke with a 0.2% chance it'll be fatal.

This is of course absolutely fantastic news for me and a great testament to following my GPs advice. I only hope that you are not reading this post mortem !

You can read up much more on this and the Framingham study here.