December 14, 2020 The more social determinants of health (SDH) a person has, the higher their risk of dying from coronary heart disease (CHD) over the next decade, observational data on more than 22,000 people confirm. Additive burdens posed by race or social isolation, poverty, economic instability, poor access to healthcare, and lower education translate into real-world consequences, Monika M. Safford, MD (Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY), and colleagues report in Circulation. This risk persists even when accounting for more-traditional markers like comorbidities and smoking. “Counting the number of SDH may be a promising approach that could be incorporated into clinical care to identify individuals at high risk of CHD,” the researchers suggest. While more-formal “indices reflecting social deprivation have been developed for population management,” they say, these tools can be unwieldy during an office visit.