“Eight” your heart out.
Researchers believe that adopting eight healthy behaviors — known as the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 — can slow the aging process and reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke and death.
“Our message is that everyone should be mindful of the eight heart disease and stroke health factors: eat healthy foods; be more active; quit tobacco; get healthy sleep; manage weight; and maintain healthy cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure levels,” senior study author Jiantao Ma said in a statement.
For Ma’s study, 5,682 adults were given a cardiovascular health score of 0 to 100 based on four behavioral measures (dietary intake, physical activity, hours slept per night and smoking status) and four clinical measurements (body mass index, cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure).
Researchers also calculated how old the participants’ cells were, also known as their biological age. Biological age is influenced by genetics, environmental exposures, and lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, and sleeping habits, while chronological age is the number of years a person has been alive.
The study authors used the chemical modification process of DNA methylation to estimate biological age and determined each person’s genetic tendency towards accelerated biological aging.
Participants were followed for 11 to 14 years to see if they developed cardiovascular disease or died.
The leading cause of death worldwide, cardiovascular disease includes heart failure, heart attack and stroke.
The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found that those who scored higher on the eight measures were less likely to develop cardiovascular disease.
Each 13-point increase in their score reduced their risk of first-time cardiovascular disease by about 35%, of cardiovascular disease death by 36%, and of death from any cause by 29%.
People with rapid cell aging may offset the increased risk by managing their heart disease risk factors and adopting more heart-healthy behaviors, the researchers said.
“Our study findings tell us that no matter what your actual age is, better heart-healthy behaviors and managing heart disease risk factors were associated with a younger biological age and a lower risk of heart disease and stroke, death from heart disease and stroke and death from any cause,” Ma said.
His team plans to expand its research to include people of other racial and ethnic groups to further investigate the relationship between cardiovascular risk factors and biological age.
The new findings bolster the results of a November study that showed that following the Life’s Essential 8 checklist may slow biological aging by six years.
