Quantification of risk factors in this analysis represents the effects of each individual risk factor, holding all other independent factors constant. The effects of multiple risk factors are not a simple addition of the individual effects and are often smaller than their sums,156 especially for cardiovascular diseases, which are affected by several risk factors (eg, table 2). The sum of the individual effects of just the metabolic risk factors at the global level is 121% and the summation of all the risks is greater than 400%.
