Last updated: 2026-06-30

Framingham Risk Score

The Framingham Risk Score estimates the probability that a person without existing cardiovascular disease will have a first cardiovascular event within the next 10 years. This calculator implements the general cardiovascular disease model published by D'Agostino and colleagues in 2008, which predicts a broad set of events — coronary heart disease, stroke, peripheral artery disease, and heart failure — from a handful of routinely measured risk factors. It also reports a vascular ("heart") age to make the result easier to act on.

The risk factors it uses

The model takes six pieces of information beyond sex: age, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, whether that blood pressure is treated, current smoking, and diabetes. Cholesterol can be entered in mg/dL or mmol/L; the calculator converts internally, so you can use the units printed on your lab report.

How the score is calculated

Each sex has its own equation. The risk factors are combined into a single linear predictor $L$ using fixed coefficients, where $\ln$ is the natural logarithm and the smoking and diabetes terms are 1 when present and 0 otherwise:

The systolic coefficient $\beta_{\text{SBP}}$ is 1.93303 when blood pressure is untreated and 1.99881 when it is treated, because treatment marks a pressure that has needed medication to control. The 10-year risk then comes from the baseline survival $S_0$:

Women use the same structure with their own coefficients (2.32888 for log-age, 1.20904 for log-TC, and so on) and the constant 26.1931.

A worked example

Take a 52-year-old man with total cholesterol 197 mg/dL, HDL 48 mg/dL, an untreated systolic pressure of 128 mmHg, who does not smoke and is not diabetic. His linear predictor works out to $L \approx -0.18$, so the risk is $1 - 0.88936^{\,e^{-0.18}} \approx 0.093$, or roughly 9.3% over 10 years — a low-risk result.

Risk categories

The 10-year percentage is conventionally split into three bands:

These bands frame conversations about lifestyle and preventive medication, but they are not hard lines. The same percentage means different things at different ages, so the number is interpreted alongside the full clinical picture.

Vascular age

Vascular age, or heart age, expresses the same risk as an age. It answers the question "how old is a person with otherwise normal risk factors who carries my level of risk?" The calculator solves the model for the age that reproduces your 10-year risk when total cholesterol is set to 180 mg/dL, HDL to 45 mg/dL, systolic pressure to an untreated 125 mmHg, with no smoking and no diabetes.

A vascular age higher than your real age means your risk factors are aging your cardiovascular system faster than the calendar. It is meant as a motivational figure rather than a precise measurement, and it falls as modifiable factors such as smoking and blood pressure improve.

Limitations and alternatives

The Framingham equations were derived mainly in a white US population and have been shown to over-estimate risk in several European and Asian groups, whose underlying cardiovascular rates differ. They apply to primary prevention — people who have not already had a cardiovascular event — and to ages roughly 30 to 74. The 2008 general CVD model is also distinct from the older "hard CHD" point-sheet versions of the Framingham score, which predicted only coronary events.

Region-specific tools are often better calibrated: the ACC/AHA Pooled Cohort Equations (ASCVD) in the United States, QRISK in the United Kingdom, SCORE2 across Europe, and the Suita score in Japan. For related measurements, see the Cholesterol Ratio Calculator, the Triglyceride to HDL Ratio Calculator, and the Mean Arterial Pressure Calculator.