Application of population attributable fraction in prevention of cardiovascular disease (Review Article)

Introduction: As cardiovascular diseases are the major cause of disability and early death around the world and they increase the cost of health care, the prevention of these kinds of disease, is very important Since Population Attributable Fraction (PAF) is one of the most important indicators in public health, it is closely related to epidemiology and measures the effects and the contribution of risk factors in public health and also helps to assess the potential impact on public health and preventive interventions. This index as a combination of the associated risk factors and frequency of exposure, provide estimation of the relationship between risk factors and disease in the community. Method and Materials: This survey is a review study which is done by searching in scientific resources such as Medline, Google Scholar, PubMed, Springer, SID and Science Direct. In this study, related keywords were identified and chosen from existing keywords in MESH and it was limited by published year that is from 2005 to 2015. Result: Cardiovascular disease is a disease with multiple causes which is studied in the articles for several important factors. After reviewing the results of the literature, it is found that factors such as age over 65 years (20-35%), hypertension (10-60%), smoking (10-40%), high cholesterol (5-45%), overweight (3-50%) and diabetes (3-15%) has the most effects in the incidence of cardiovascular disease. Conclusion: Given that the incidence of chronic and non-communicable diseases is multifactorial, it seems necessary to determine contribution of each factor in causing the disease, for prioritizing and preventive interventions. Although PAF is based on theory, it is a fully functional index for prioritizing preventive and therapeutic interventions. For the prevention of cardiovascular disease stronger actions on screening, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of modifiable risk factors such as hypertension, smoking, factors associated with hyperlipidemia, obesity, overweight and diabetes are needed. So that by controlling these factors, the risk of cardiovascular diseases can greatly be reduced.