Tools such as the Framingham Stroke Risk Profile¹, QRISK², QSTROKE³ and the Stroke Riskometer⁴are publicly available and free resources that can be used to estimate risk of having a stroke or other cardiovascular events within the next 10 years. They do this by looking at things like age, sex, height, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol level.

These tools give risk as a percentage, which shows how many people in 100 with the same risk score as you will get heart disease or have a stroke.

For example, if your risk is 20%, then in a group of 100 people with the same 20% risk, we would expect that 20 of them would get heart disease or have a stroke within the next 10 years and 80 would not.

Figure 1. For a group of ten people, two can be expected to experience a stroke in their lifetime.