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• Smoking, diabetes increase risk of heart attacks, strokes, death  

They're called "risk factors" for a reason - people with high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol and/or a smoking habit are much more likely to have heart attacks, strokes and other manifestations of cardiovascular disease, including death.

A new study coming out in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine analyzed health data on more than 250,000 adults to confirm that those who had any of these risk factors were in greater peril than those who didn't. The more risk factors a person had - and the more severe they were - the greater the lifetime risk of a "cardiovascular event." This trend held for both men and women, and for both whites and blacks.

The raw data in the new study came from 18 so-called cohort studies - including the Framingham Heart Study, the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study and the Multi-Ethnic Study of Artherosclerorisis - that examined people at least once when they were around the ages of 45, 55, 65 and 75.

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