Researchers from Northwestern Medicine and Yonsei University pooled the health data of 9,341,100 South Korean adults, as well as 6,803 US adults, looking at four key risk factors: high blood pressure, cholesterol, blood-sugar levels and smoking. They found that – in both cohorts – more than 99% of people who suffered coronary heart disease (CHD) had problematic levels of at least one of the four risk factors.

> Those specific risk factors, the data revealed, were:

> - Blood pressure ≥120/80 mm Hg or on treatment

> - Total cholesterol ≥200 mg/dL or on treatment

> - Fasting glucose ≥100 mg/dL, diagnosis of diabetes or on treatment

> - Past or current tobacco use

ScholarlyArticle: "Very High Prevalence of Nonoptimally Controlled Traditional Risk Factors at the Onset of Cardiovascular Disease" (2025) https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2025.07.014

What percent of the population as a whole has at least one of these "red flags"? I'd suspect that at least a vast majority of Americans have at least one of these, especially when the Blood Pressure measurement is still within the normal range.

I don’t understand how correlation/causation errors are mitigated here…

Surely more than 99.6% of people “inhaled air” before a heart attack too.

I’m sure there must be more to it but the way this is reported doesn’t make sense at all.

Would have been useful to mention what % of people had one or more of these “red flags” and didn’t have a heart attack.

You're talking about a base rate fallacy, which is a different thing than correlation/causation errors. (Both are potentially problems given the high-level description of the study, the full text of which is behind a paywall)