The AHA PREVENT risk calculator, broken down for you: get ASCVD, heart failure, and total CVD risk — across both 10-year and 30-year horizons — using the validated 2023 American Heart Association PREVENT equations.
AHA 2023 equations · Ages 30–79 · For adults without known CVD
The AHA PREVENT Score is a comprehensive cardiovascular risk estimate derived from the 2023 American Heart Association PREVENT equations (Khan SS et al., Circulation 2024;149:430–449). Where a standard cardiovascular risk calculator gives you one number, the PREVENT Score breaks your risk into three separate components — each calculated with its own validated model:
All three are provided for both the 10-year and 30-year time horizons, giving you six risk estimates from a single set of inputs.
Total CVD, ASCVD, and heart failure × 10-year and 30-year horizons — each computed from separate validated coefficient sets.
eGFR is a core input, especially important for the heart failure model where reduced kidney function is a strong predictor.
Unlike the older ASCVD calculator, BMI is a required input — particularly influential on heart failure risk, not just ASCVD.
This is the most common question about this page, and it is a fair one — both tools use exactly the same 2023 AHA PREVENT equations. The difference is in what they display:
If you only need one number for a statin decision conversation, use the PREVENT Calculator. If you want to understand your full risk profile, use this page.
Heart failure and atherosclerotic disease share some risk factors (age, blood pressure, diabetes, smoking) but diverge significantly on others. Heart failure risk is much more sensitive to BMI and eGFR — obesity strains the heart mechanically, and kidney dysfunction is both a cause and consequence of heart failure. This is why the PREVENT equations use entirely separate coefficient sets for heart failure versus ASCVD, and why adding these inputs was a key innovation of the 2023 update.
Practically, this means a patient with obesity and early kidney disease eGFR 55 but relatively normal cholesterol may have a much higher heart failure risk than their ASCVD Risk suggests — a pattern the older Pooled Cohort Equations would have missed entirely.
If you've searched for the "ACC/AHA risk calculator," "American Heart Association risk calculator," or "AHA cholesterol calculator," you're looking for the same family of tools this page belongs to. Here's how the naming maps out:
In practice, this means the AHA's current cardiac risk calculator, cardiovascular risk calculator, and cholesterol/statin risk calculator have all been consolidated into the same set of PREVENT equations used here. Depending on what you need, you may also want:
Both use the same 2023 AHA equations. The PREVENT Calculator shows your total CVD risk as a single headline number. The PREVENT Score Calculator adds the breakdown — ASCVD risk, heart failure risk, and both 10-year and 30-year estimates — giving a more complete clinical picture.
30-year risk compounds your current risk factor burden over a much longer period and accounts for the natural increase in CVD risk with aging. For a 40-year-old with borderline risk factors, a 10-year risk of 4% can still translate to a 30-year risk of 20–35%. This is exactly why the AHA introduced 30-year estimates — to motivate earlier prevention conversations in younger adults where 10-year risk appears deceptively low.
Total CVD = ASCVD + heart failure. ASCVD covers heart attacks and strokes. Heart failure is calculated separately and added on top. Because the two components share some (but not all) risk factors and use different baseline survival values, you cannot simply subtract ASCVD from total CVD to get heart failure risk — they are computed independently using separate equations.
Use this page if you want to understand which component — ASCVD or heart failure — is the bigger driver of your risk, or if your doctor has asked you to track both components separately. For a simple primary prevention conversation about whether to start a statin, the basic PREVENT Calculator is sufficient.
They're the same lineage, different generations. The older ACC/AHA Pooled Cohort Equations estimated only heart attack and stroke risk. In 2023 the American Heart Association replaced it with PREVENT, which adds heart failure risk, uses eGFR and BMI as inputs, and drops race as a variable. If you're looking for today's official AHA risk calculator, PREVENT — used on this page — is it.
It's been superseded by the 2023 PREVENT equations. Cholesterol (as non-HDL) is still a core input, but PREVENT uses updated coefficients, so it produces different — and more accurate — estimates than the older cholesterol-only ASCVD tool for the same lab values.
Yes — a Spanish-language version is available at preventcalculator.com/es/prevent-score-calculator.html, using the same 2023 AHA PREVENT equations with the interface and results translated into Spanish.