Yuichiro Matsuo
Tokyo Bay Urayasu Ichikawa Medical Center, Department of Internal Medicine
I am grateful that I could receive the Kurokawa Prize in the Annual Meeting of ACP Japan 2019. The basic idea of our study “Japanese people tend to overestimate their future cardiovascular risk” originated from the question, “aren’t people unnecessary worried about developing cardiovascular disease (CVD)?” In Japan, the risk of developing CVD in a patient with a slightly elevated LDL cholesterol is relatively low, in most cases, only a few percent in 10 years. Our impression was that people seem to be much more worried about developing CVD.
In our study, we could show that patients undergoing routine health check-up in our center significantly overestimated their risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Patients estimated their 10-year CVD risk as around 30%, compared with the calculated risk of 3%. From this result, we can make a hypothesis that CVD risk management in Japan may be conducted based on this misunderstanding.
We are planning for further research on this field. Will this misunderstanding affect the patient’s health seeking behavior, satisfaction, outcome, and will there be a positive effect of correcting this misunderstanding?
I would like to thank my boss, Dr. Eiji Hiraoka for supporting the whole work, and I would also like to thank all the people who were responsible for preparing this meeting.
