Predicting a patient's risk for developing heart disease or diabetes can be like looking into a crystal ball. Such a tool is now an online reality thanks to a team of researchers from the University of Virginia School (UVA) of Medicine and the University of Florida.

The findings were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Currently, physicians predict a patient’s risk of heart disease and diabetes by analyzing the factors such as obesity, blood pressure, fasting triglycerides, HDL (good) cholesterol and fasting blood sugar. Without consideration of the patient’s race, ethnicity and gender, these predictions cannot expand on how a person can address the factors individually.

"This boils it down to telling a patient, 'On the risk spectrum, you are here, and you're in a position where we're worried you're going to have a cardiovascular event in the next 10 years,'" said Mark DeBoer, MD, of the UVA School of Medicine and the UVA Children's Hospital. "My hypothesis is that the more specific information you can give to individuals at risk, the more they will understand it and be motivated to make some changes."

Developed by DeBoer and Matthew Gurka, PhD, from the University of Florida, the online calculator accounts for five major factors including race, ethnicity and gender to produce a metabolic severity score showing the risk each patient faces in developing heart disease and diabetes. The study measured the predictive analytics for more than 13,000 patients and found the tool to be more accurate than analyzing just the five main factors.

"This would suggest that when somebody has this congregation of metabolic syndrome findings, there probably is some underlying process that is producing those findings, and that those underlying processes are also contributing to future risk," said DeBoer. "The hope is that a scoring system like this could be incorporated in the electronic medical record to calculate someone's risk and that information could be provided both to the physician, who then realizes there is an elevated risk, and to the patient, who hopefully can start taking some preventative steps."