Patients with High Cardiovascular Risk in the Practice of a Primary Care Physician

Abstract

In the modern practice of the family doctor the share of patients with cardiovascular pathology, the feature of which has the tendency to decrease the age requirement, is growing every day. CVD morbidity and mortality rates are rising steadily worldwide, by about 2% each year. The main task of primary care physicians is to identify patients at risk of cardiovascular disease and early prevention of such diseases by eliminating the factors of their development, especially in young people in the preclinical stage. Traditional risk factors for CVD are hypertension, smoking, hypodynamics, obesity, dyslipidemia and more. With the development and improvement of clinical observations, the number of risk factors that can cause cardiovascular disease increase. At the end of the 20th century, the scientific community increasingly began to focus on individual nosological units, which are independent predictors of CVD and associated with them pathogenetically. These include nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), hereditary hyper- and dyslipidemias, such as hetero- and homozygous hypercholesterolemia, familial combined hyperlipidemia, and others. With a latent course, these pathologies are not diagnosed or treated for a long time, which leads to a reduction in the duration of cardiovascular catastrophe in patients with these diseases by 20 years compared to the general population. Even when detected, these diseases are often underestimated as risk factors for future CVD by both physician and patient. That why for the effective prevention of cardiovascular diseases and their complications, the primary care physician must fully have information about the presence of possible risk factors, be able to detect, diagnose and prevent them in a timely manner. The family physician should also inform the patient of the need for lifestyle modifications to effectively address the risks involved and prevent CVD in the future.