Introduction: As cardiovascular diseases are the major cause of disability and early death around the world and they increase the cost of health care, their prevention is deemed important. Population Attributable Fraction, one of the most important indicators in public health and closely associated with epidemiology, can help measure the effects and contribution of risk factors to public health and assess potential outcomes of preventive interventions for community health.Materials and Methods: This review article examined all papers published in scientific resources such as Medline, Google Scholar, PubMed, Springer, SID and Science Direct in Persian or English from 2005 to 2015. Keywords of the present study were selected from MESH.Results: After reviewing the results of the published papers, the following factors were found contributing to cardiovascular diseases: age over 65 years (20-35%), hypertension (10-60%), smoking (10-40%), high total cholesterol (5-45%), overweight (3-50%) and diabetes (3-15%).Conclusion: It is vital that serious preventive measures be taken for screening, diagnosis and treatment of modifiable risk factors such as hypertension, smoking, hyperlipidemia, obesity, overweight and diabetes.