How general practitioners perceive and grade the cardiovascular risk of their patients.

Background: Although risk assessment charts have been proposed to identify patients at high cardiovascular risk, in everyday practice general practitioners (GPs) often use their knowledge of the patients to estimate the risk subjectively.

Design: A cross-sectional study aimed to describe how GPs perceive, qualify and grade cardiovascular risk in everyday practice.

Methods: General practitioners had to identify in a random sample of 10% of their contacts the first 20 consecutive patients perceived as being at cardiovascular risk.