QRISK®3
Please use QRISK®3. You can find the calculator here:
Explaining annual updates
We release a new version of QRISK® every spring, usually in April.
Annual updates are required because of:
- Changes in population characteristics - for example, incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is falling; obesity is rising; smoking rates are falling;
- Changes in requirements for how the risk prediction scores can be used, e.g. changes in age ranges.
- Improvements in data quality - for example the recording of exposures and also clinical outcomes becomes more complete over time. This is especially true for recording of ethnicity data which is becoming more complete. All 1243 practices in England currently contributing to the QResearch® database (version 40) now have data linked at patient level to the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database. This means it is possible to identify patients who have been admitted to hospital for cardiovascular disease where this information is not already recorded on the GP record or linked mortality record from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). Both HES and ONS mortality data linkages extend back to 1997.
These factors require us to remodel the QRISK® algorithm to the latest version of the QResearch® database each year to ensure the algorithm keeps up to date. If the algorithm is not re-calculated, then its performance would gradually decay and its clinical value would diminish as a result. We therefore re-fit the algorithm using a three quarter random sample of the QResearch® practices and incorporate this into the annual update of the software.
The change from QRISK®2 to QRISK®3 was such an annual update --
we thought that as we introduced several new parameters, we'd upgrade its major version number.
QRISK®3 is the standard version of QRISK® shipped in our software development kits. As these updates are deployed,
all implementations will become QRISK®3 by default.
QRISK®2
Still using QRISK®2-2017, 2016 or 2015?
That's just fine. They work very well. The older calculators are not quite as good as the newer ones, as population demographics and relative risks are slowly changing. We recommend that those who have integrated QRISK®2 into their own systems move to the QRISK®3-2018 score as soon as is practicable -- this means that they have the freedom to schedule the work needed into a convenient point of their release cycle.
QRISK2-2017
We sometimes keep links to earlier calculators: