People with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) have a higher than average risk to develop and die from Cardiovascular Disease, including heart attacks, stroke, and heart failure. This may be due to the adverse effects of uncontrolled chronic inflammation on the heart and blood vessels, due to some “classical risk factors” for heart disease, such as high blood pressure, lipids and being overweight being more common in people with RA or other reasons, including medications used for the treatment of RA.
The cardiovascular risk of patients with RA is underestimated by risk algorithms / calculators developed for the general population, for example The Framingham Risk Score (commonly used in the United States) or the HeartSCORE (commonly used in Europe).
The need for an RA-specific cardiovascular risk calculator is appreciated for many years, but no single study or centre in the world has sufficient data to develop such an algorithm with any accuracy.
The ATACC-RD consortium was initially formed in 2013 with the main objective to develop an RA-specific cardiovascular risk calculator suitable for use in many countries.
Investigators with an international track record in cardiovascular research in RA have joined their forces and data in order to achieve this objective. These investigators have collectively contributed in excess of 600 peer reviewed publications in the field of cardiovascular comorbidity of rheumatic diseases, reflecting possibly the largest collective knowledge and experience in this field by a single group of collaborators. Their individual work covers the whole range of research in the field, from basic mechanistic studies addressing the causes of this problem, to epidemiology, observational work, biomarkers and non-invasive vascular assessments, to randomized controlled trials of pharmaceuticals and even lifestyle modification protocols, all the way to utilization of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning. Some of their work has been used in the development of national and international guidelines for cardiovascular risk management in people with rheumatic diseases.