People aged 35 to 70 should use the Health Promotion Administration’s (HPA) chronic disease risk calculator to understand their risk of developing coronary heart disease, the agency said on Tuesday.
Citing Ministry of Health and Welfare data on the 10 most common causes of death in Taiwan last year, the HPA said that heart disease ranked second, killing more than 20,000 people each year.
Coronary heart disease, which is often referred to as a “silent killer,” and hypertensive heart disease are common among middle-aged people, it said, adding that angina and heart attack are the most common coronary heart diseases that can cause sudden death.
Among people aged 40 and older, 25.2 percent have abnormal blood lipids, 21.2 percent have hypertension and 48.48 percent have a large waist circumference, which is a red flag for excessive abdominal fat, the HPA said.
People should not ignore the signs, as they are important risk factors for coronary heart disease, HPA Deputy Director-General Wu Chao-chun (吳昭軍) said.
Frequently eating foods high in fat, sugar and salt, as well as smoking and alcohol, can increase the risk of high blood pressure, developing a large waistline or metabolic syndrome, and can even lead to coronary heart disease, the HPA said.
The agency has developed a chronic disease risk calculator (https://cdrc.hpa.gov.tw/index.jsp), which references health studies and National Health Insurance data, allowing people aged 35 to 70 to assess their risk level of developing five types of common chronic diseases over 10 years.
The diseases are coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, stroke and major cardiovascular events.
Users of the risk calculator will be asked to provide data from their latest health exams, as well as their sex, age, waist size, systolic blood pressure, high-density lipoprotein, cholesterol and triglyceride levels if they want to calculate their risk of developing coronary heart disease, the HPA said.
It also urged people who are at high risk of the diseases to measure their blood pressure levels daily and work on keeping it under control, exercise regularly — about three to four times a week and 30 minutes per time — and keep their waistlines under 90cm for men and under 80cm for women.
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