This book is intended for the practicing physician and as such it must be considered a propagandistic, doctrinaire, and sophistic document. The author sets out to test those clinical measures which, in his view, have statistically supported significance in indicating future overt coronary heart disease without regard to the mechanisms involved. He proposes to use two: the diastolic blood pressure and the atherogenic index. The latter was set up by the author and his associates from the distribution of classes of lipoproteins separated by the use of the ultracentrifuge. He argues that these two indexes, when combined, predict the risk (which he carefully defines) of the future occurrence of clinical coronary heart disease. When these indexes are added year by year, their cumulative value is even better as a warning of risk than that of any single reading. He states that family background, age, sex, weight, diet, cigarette smoking, diabetes