Introduction:

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the main cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The use of the Framingham Risk Score is of great importance for predicting CVD risk.

Objective:

To estimate the 10-year CVD risk in adult patients diagnosed high blood pressure (HBP) who visited the outpatient service of the San Miguelito de Píllaro Health Center, in Tungura-hua, Ecuador, using the Framingham Risk Score (2008).

Materials and methods:

Cross-sectional, observational, prospective and descriptive study conducted in 120 HBP patients aged 30 to 74 years who visited the outpatient service between January and October 2017. Data were obtained from the review of medical records, which were in turn updated during the execution of the study. The Framingham risk score was used to calculate the 10-year CVD risk. A descriptive analysis of the data was performed in Epi Info 7, using absolute frequencies and percentages.

Results:

Of the 120 patients, 59.17% were women. Furthermore, 15% of the participants had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus, 13.33% had a history of smoking, 47.50% had elevated systolic blood pressure, and 39.17% had hypercholesterolemia. CVD risk was low (≤ 1% Framingham score), intermediate (10-19%), and high (≥ 20%) in 15%, 29.16%, and 59.16% of participants, respectively. None of them had a very low CVD risk (≤1%).

Conclusion:

The Framingham risk score was useful to estimate CVD risk in the study population treated in the primary health care setting. Consequently, more extensive use of this instrument in different health units is recommended to obtain better estimates of CVD risk and, as a result, achieve the implementation of health prevention and health care actions that improve the prognosis in the medium and long term, and thus the quality of life of these patients.

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