Having healthy habits for heart health would also help fight against general aging of the body.
- The benefits of better heart health may be associated with positive impact on cellular aging, a new study suggests.
- People with accelerated aging saw their risk of cardiovascular disease drop by 39% when they adopted heart-healthy habits.
- Their risk of dying from heart disease also fell by 39%.
Eating healthy, exercising, not smoking… All of these heart-healthy habits also help fight aging. Here are the findings of new research published May 29, 2024, in the journal Journal of the American Heart Association.
Good cardiac practices aren’t just good for your heart.
To test whether heart health and cellular aging might be linked, the researchers examined the medical records of 5,682 adults with an average age of 56. Each participant, followed for an average of 14 years, was assessed using American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8. This is a tool that assesses good practices and essential elements for heart health: balanced diet, physical activity, hours of sleep per night and smoking, body mass index, cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure. Their biological age was also determined, in particular via DNA methylation.
The data showed that for every 13-point increase in the Life’s Essential 8 score, the risk of developing cardiovascular disease for the first time was reduced by about 35%. The risk of dying from cardiovascular disease was reduced by 36% and by 29% for death from all causes.
Another finding: the benefits of adopting heart-healthy habits were even greater in volunteers with a rapid cellular aging profile. Their risks of cardiovascular disease, death from cardiovascular disease or death from all causes decreased by 39%, 39% and 78%, respectively.
It is possible to compensate for rapid cellular aging
“Our study results tell us that regardless of your actual age, better heart-healthy behaviors and better management of heart disease risk factors were associated with younger biological age and lower risk of heart disease and stroke, death from heart disease and stroke, and death from any cause.”explains Jiantao Ma, lead author of the study and assistant professor in the division of nutritional epidemiology and data science at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, in a communicated.
Their authors believe that people with rapid cellular aging can compensate for the increased risk of heart disease, stroke or even death by managing their heart disease risk factors and adopting more heart-healthy behaviors.
