I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of risk and benefit. Over the last 20 to 25 years or so we have become quite adept at calculating risk for individual patients. Certainly from a cardiovascular point of view we are very good at defining high risk individuals, i.e. those at a high likelihood of having a first or subsequent adverse CV event. To date our strategy has been to treat high risk individuals aggressively, attempting to reduce CV events. In many cases this is completely appropriate.