Something of a revelation in this medical study reported by the BBC I think :

A person’s age can be used as effectively as medical tests to predict the risk of heart disease or stroke, according to a new study.

The report says offering treatment to all those over 55 would achieve the same results as screening through tests like blood pressure or cholesterol.

…

The authors, writing in the open access journal PLoS ONE, said age was by far the biggest factor in assessing someone’s risk of cardiovascular disease such as heart attack or stroke.

They compared the effects of two screening programmes on a theoretical population of 500,000 people.

The first approach used screening just by age, where, at the age of 55, people would be offered preventive treatment, regardless of whether they were at risk.

The second approach used existing screening methods, based on age and sex, and whether someone was a smoker or has high blood pressure or cholesterol.

They found that both approaches had an 84% detection rate, but that offering everyone preventive treatment at 55 would be more cost effective.

The two methods also had a broadly similar false-positive rate – in other words, using age alone would diagnose 24% of people as being at risk, when in fact they would not go on to develop heart problems.

Existing methods of screening identified 21% of false-positives.

Yes, theoretical studies based on models but interesting that someone should make the point that age alone is a better predictor of heart disease than your lifestyle in a published study :

The policy of selecting people above a certain age is, in effect, selecting people at high risk. It recognises that age is by far the most important determinant of that risk with other factors adding little extra prognostic information.

Not surprisingly, shroud waving groups with their snouts in the trough have to toe the party line :

But the British Heart Foundation said other risk factors in addition to age needed to be taken into account when it came to assessing the future risk of heart and circulatory problems.

Well BHF, not according to the study but that would torpedo your government funding streams wouldn’t it?

I fully expected Shenker and other assorted “experts” to be paraded in the article but they must have been out of the office today.