Journal of Labor and Childbirth

Family Cardiovascular Diseases Journals

 Hypertension alone is a poor predictor of the individual risk of cardiovascular disease. Hereditary factors of which hypertension is merely a marker may explain why some hypertensive individuals appear more susceptible to cardiovascular disease, and why some ethnicities have more often seemingly hypertension‐related cardiovascular disease than others. We hypothesize that, in hypertensive individuals, a positive family history of cardiovascular disease identifies a high‐risk subpopulation. The objective of this article is to review and summarize the published research on the relationship between a FH of CVD, a person’s perceived risk, and health-related behavior in order to make recommendations for clinical practice and future research. In this paper, CVD is used to include the general term heart disease and the more specific terms of coronary heart disease (CHD) and myocardial infarction (MI). FH will be used to denote the longer term “family history of CVD.” Perceived risk is an individual’s subjective risk for developing CVD in their lifetime or within a certain period of time (10-year CHD risk, for example). An individual’s perceived risk may accurately reflect their objective risk, based on CVD risk factors, or may be higher or lower than their objective risk. Health related-behaviors are the behaviors known to increase or decrease CVD risk, specifically smoking status, diet, and physical activity. The underlying assumption is that a FH results in increased perceived risk, which causes an uptake of positive health-related behaviors (smoking cessation, eating a low-fat, low cholesterol diet, and engaging in adequate physical activity on a weekly basis), decreasing one’s risk factors for CVD. This paper will review the research that has examined all, or parts of, this assumption.  

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