Most Americans Have “Old” Hearts—Is Your Cardiovascular Health at Risk?
With the current biohacking obsession to feel younger and live longer, you may be aware of the difference between chronological age (the number of years you’ve been alive) and biological age (how “old” your cells are, which is an indicator of your overall health). Now, a new study is calling attention to “heart age”—and sounding the alarm on the fact that most Americans have “old” cardiovascular systems.
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A new calculator predicts your “heart age.”
A new study, published in the journal JAMA Cardiology, sought to quantify cardiovascular disease risk in a more accurate way than traditional percentages. “For example, a health care clinician may tell a patient, ‘8 out of 100 people with your profile may have a heart event in the next 10 years,'” explained a press release.
To build on this, researchers from Northwestern Medicine created a new heart disease risk calculator based on the American Heart Association’s PREVENT (Predicting Risk of cardiovascular disease EVENTs) equations. Instead of calculating risk as a percentage, it gives you your “heart age,” which the team says is easier for most people to understand.
The PREVENT Risk Age Calculator is free for anyone to use and includes the following metrics:
- Sex (male or female)
- Age (30-79)
- Total cholesterol
- HDL cholesterol
- Systolic blood pressure
- Diabetes (yes or no)
- eGFR (estimated glomerular filtration rate, a measure of how well your kidneys are filtering waste)
- Anti-hypertensive medication (yes or no)
- Statin medication (yes or no)
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Most U.S. adults have a “heart age” several years older than their chronological age.
In addition to creating the calculator, the researchers tested it on more than 14,000 U.S. adults between the ages of 30 and 79, all of whom had no prior history of cardiovascular disease. They determined the following average results:
- Women had a heart age of 55.4, compared to a chronological age of 51.3 (+4.1 years)
- Men had a heart age of 56.7 compared to a chronological age of 49.7 (+ 7 years)
Education and race also played a role:
- Nearly one-third of men with a high school education or less had a heart age of 10+ years older than their chronological age
- Black men’s heart age was +8.5 years, and Black women’s heart age was +6.2 years
- Hispanic men’s heart age was +7.9 years, and Hispanic women’s heart age was +4.8 years
- Asian men’s heart age was +6.7 years, and Asian women’s heart age was +2.8 years
- White men’s heart age was +6.4 years, and White women’s heart age was +3.7 years
The research team is quick to note that the calculator should not replace regular visits with your doctor or their advice. However, they do hope it can help healthcare providers treat patients.
“Many people who should be on medicine to lower their risk for heart attack, stroke or heart failure are not on these medications. We hope this new heart age calculator will help support discussions about prevention and ultimately improve health for all people,” said lead study author Sadiya Khan, MD, MSc, the Magerstadt professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Next, Khan and her team plan to study whether using the calculator to predict risk improves health outcomes.