QRISK3 and your 10-year heart risk, explained

QRISK3 is the calculator doctors across the UK use to estimate your chance of a heart attack or stroke over the next ten years. It turns a set of everyday facts about you into a single percentage, and understanding it helps the number mean something rather than just land on you.

It pulls together your age, sex and ethnicity, your blood pressure, your cholesterol, whether you smoke, your weight, your family history of early heart disease, and certain conditions such as diabetes that raise risk. Out comes a percentage: a score of ten percent means that out of a hundred people like you, around ten would be expected to have a heart attack or stroke in the next decade.

The number is a guide to action, not a sentence. A higher score is the prompt to look at what can be changed, and most of the inputs can move: blood pressure, cholesterol, weight and smoking all respond, and where risk is high enough, medication such as a statin tips the balance further. A lower score is reassurance, with a sense of what keeps it there.

It has limits. It is built for certain age ranges and works less well at the extremes, it can under-read risk in someone with a strong inherited tendency, and it leans on population averages.

It is also not the only score, and from the same information we can run others that add a different angle. A lifetime estimate, and the idea of a "heart age", is often more telling than a ten-year figure for younger people, whose ten-year number tends to look low while their longer-term risk is not, and it makes the result easier to picture. The European SCORE2 gives a second, modern estimate. And because every equation leans on population averages, the markers we measure, ApoB, Lp(a) and hs-CRP, with a calcium score where it is warranted, sharpen the picture for you as an individual rather than as a statistic.

Whether you do this online or come in, we calculate your risk, run the scores that add something, explain what is driving the number, and turn it into a plan you can act on. The score is the start of the conversation, not the end of it.

Ready to start? Choose the check that fits your question and tell us a little about yourself. A doctor reviews it, arranges what you need, and explains what it means. Most of it is done online, with the clinic there if you would rather be seen.