Cutting heart risks early could add years to life
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The number of cardiovascular risk factors people have at age 50 can have a dramatic impact on their life expectancy, researchers are reporting.
The findings, based on a large, long-running U.S. study, suggest that 50-year-olds who are free of major risk factors like high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes and high cholesterol are unlikely to suffer coronary heart disease or stroke in their lifetime.
Moreover, 50-year-olds without cardiovascular risk factors could expect to live about a decade longer than their peers with multiple risk factors.
The study, published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation, focused on major, modifiable risk factors for atherosclerosis, the formation of artery-clogging plaques that is the most common cause of heart disease and stroke. The risk factors were being overweight, smoking or having diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol.
Among men who were free of these risk factors at age 50, only 5 percent developed atherosclerosis-related heart disease or stroke by the age of 95. That compared with 69 percent of men who had two or more risk factors at age 50.
The difference was substantial among women as well - 8 percent, versus 50 percent.
Those single-digit rates of heart disease and stroke are “incredibly low,” said lead study author Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Cardiovascular disease is by far the top killer of Americans, he pointed out in an interview, as well as a major cause of disability and poor quality of life. Few people in the current study had “optimal risk factor levels” at the age of 50—just 3 percent of men and 4.5 percent of women.
Preventing major risk factors from arising by middle age may not be easy, Lloyd-Jones said, “but it’s achievable.”
The key, he said, will be to think about atherosclerosis prevention decades before the age of 50, even in childhood—especially given the growing problem of obesity and inactivity among U.S. children.
“We have to focus not just on preventing the disease, but on (preventing) the risk factors,” he told Reuters Health.
That means never taking up the smoking habit, and maintaining a healthy diet and regular exercise to prevent excess weight gain and lower the risks of type 2 diabetes and elevated blood pressure and cholesterol.
Type 2 diabetes, once a disease of adults, is now being diagnosed in children and teenagers, and recent studies have found that atherosclerosis can begin to form during childhood.
Though he underscored the importance of preventing risk factors like diabetes and high blood pressure, Lloyd-Jones also stressed that “it’s never too late” to make changes that bring the conditions under control once they’re diagnosed.
SOURCE: Circulation, online February 6, 2006.
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