Maintaining a healthy heart might be the secret to staying young, according to a new study. Researchers working with the American Heart Association discovered that following the AHA’s “Life’s Essential 8” healthy habits to slows down aging could help someone slow their aging by as much as six years.
The study’s focus is on how a healthy heart might keep our bodies feeling and functioning younger than our actual chronological age. Researchers used the checklist to measure heart and brain health during their experiments. This checklist factors in lifestyle choices and health measures like sleep, diet, and blood pressure to gauge an individual’s cardiovascular well-being.
Specifically, the Life’s Essential 8 checklist includes:
- Eat Better
- Be More Active
- Quit Tobacco
- Get Healthy Sleep
- Manage Weight
- Control Cholesterol
- Manage Blood Sugar
- Manage Blood Pressure
Biological age, in this context, is determined by something called phenotypic age, a concept that goes beyond the traditional calendar to assess our body’s true wear and tear. Phenotypic age is calculated by adding up your chronological age (how old you are according to your birth date) with the results of nine different blood tests that check various markers like sugar levels, inflammation, and kidney function. When someone’s phenotypic age is higher than their actual age, it suggests that their body is aging faster biologically.
“We found that higher cardiovascular health is associated with decelerated biological aging, as measured by phenotypic age. We also found a dose-dependent association – as heart health goes up, biological aging goes down,” says study senior author Nour Makarem, Ph.D., an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, in a media release. “Phenotypic age is a practical tool to assess our body’s biological aging process and a strong predictor of future risk of disease and death.”
The research team discovered that people with better heart health had a younger biological age compared to those with poor heart health. For instance, people with high cardiovascular health had an average chronological age of 41 but their bodies appeared to be 36 years-old biologically. On the flip side, individuals with low cardiovascular health were, on average, 53 years-old but had a biological age of 57.
Adjusting for socioeconomic and demographic differences, the researchers noted that the best scores on the Life’s Essential 8 checklist correlated with a biological age that was, on average, six years younger than the actual age.
Source: https://studyfinds.org/8-healthy-habits-slows-down-aging/