A few simple tests could tell a postmenopausal woman if she has a high risk of developing heart disease.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh say that identifying high-risk women will allow doctors to intervene with aggressive treatment to prevent heart attacks.

Dr. Lewis Kuller, of the Graduate School of Public Health, presented the findings yesterday at an American Heart Association meeting in Orlando, Fla.

"Some women are at very high risk and don't know it, because they don't get these measurements," he said.

Those measurements include blood tests that measure insulin resistance by looking at levels of glucose, insulin and adiponectin -- a hormone secreted by fat cells. Adiponectin makes body tissues more sensitive to insulin and decreases the liver's production of glucose. High levels of adiponectin also may reduce the risk of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, Kuller added.

He also advocates blood tests that examine the patient's profile of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, and high-density lipoprotein, or HDL.

"Women who are at high risk have small LDL particles, an excess number of LDL particles and have low levels of large HDL [particles]," Kuller said.

Elevated LDL counts can lead to calcium deposits in the coronary arteries, which in turn increase the likelihood of heart attack. Doctors can look for the artery deposits with a noninvasive scan called electron beam tomography, or EBT.

"This combination of looking at lipoprotein particle distribution and at the coronary calcium, plus the understanding of insulin resistance, gives us a very good picture of what leads to atherosclerosis in coronary arteries in women," Kuller said.

He is leading Woman On the Move through Activity and Nutrition, or WOMAN, a five-year study testing whether high-risk women fare better with weight loss and intensive treatments like cholesterol-lowering drugs than with exercise and diet modification alone.

"In the first six months that we've looked at it, there's no question that the patterns change very positively" in the intensive treatment group, Kuller said.