Major Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease

Abstract
Conventional wisdom (or misconception) holds that the 4 major modifiable traditional cardiovascular risk factors—smoking, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia—account for "only 50%" of those who go on to develop coronary heart disease (CHD),1,2 even though the original source of this claim is not well documented. Thus, over the past decade, a search to discover novel markers and other nontraditional risk factors to assess cardiovascular risk has come to the forefront.