A NEW way of predicting how disease will be distributed throughout the country has put the borough in the low-risk bottom five of its table for heart disease over the next ten years.

GeoMedics is a new service which analyses health and population data to calculate present and future burdens of disease in areas as small as an electoral ward.

The system takes into account factors such as census data, age, ethnicity, relative affluence, diet and smoking when making predictions.

It could be a valuable source for the Waltham Forest Primary Care Trust when planning future expenditure.

Dorothy Knightley, managing director of TNS UK Healthcare, which helped develop the model with Portsmouth University, said: "The PCTs need to know where their high-risk wards are, where they will get the best health returns on their investment.

"There's no sense in putting a smoking cessation unit in an area where not many people smoke, for example."

Areas along the south coast fared particularly poorly under the system, with people living along the coasts of Sussex, Dorset and Devon at the highest risk of suffering heart attack or stroke over the next ten years.