The American Heart Association (AHA) has created an index to measure one’s health. The Life Essential Eight is a checklist of lifestyle changes one can make to improve cardiovascular health, lower the risk of heart disease, and slow biological aging by six years.
“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,” said Nour Makarem, Ph. D. assistant professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
The American Heart Association released the Life Essential Eight in 2022. People can go to My Life Check on the AHA website to see their score on the index. Improvement in these eight areas can drastically improve one’s health. The eight are eating better, being more active, quitting tobacco, getting healthy sleep, managing weight, and controlling cholesterol, blood sugar, and blood pressure. The list was originally the simple seven, but new data from the organization have proven sleep important for cardiovascular health.
AHA’s past president, Dr. Donald Lloyd Jones, explained that people who get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep manage health factors such as weight, blood pressure, and risk for type 2 diabetes more efficiently. He also shared that the simple seven came out in 2010, and over a decade of discoveries through research promoted the addition.
The My Life Check operates on a score system between 0 – 100 for each item in the Life Essential Eight. Below 50 is considered poor cardiovascular health. 50 – 79 is moderate, and 80 and above is high. The AHA wants to use the Life Essential Eight to avert more cardiovascular deaths. Various research studies over the past two decades indicate more than 80% of all cardiovascular events may be prevented by a healthy lifestyle and management of known cardiovascular risk factors. In the 2024 report, 25 percent of U.S. adults have bad cholesterol. 9.7 million have undiagnosed diabetes, while 116 million have prediabetes.
Slow biological aging is the latest update regarding the Life Essential Eight. According to a news release from November 2023, 6,500 adults participated in the 2015-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The results show participants with high cardiovascular health had a negative phenotypic age acceleration, which means that they were younger than expected physiologically. According to the news release, the average age of participants with high cardiovascular health was 41, but their biological age was 36.
The release explains that phenotypic age is a measure of biological age calculated based on your chronological age plus the results of nine blood markers for metabolism, inflammation, and organ function. Phenotypic age acceleration is the difference between one’s phenotypic age and actual age. A higher phenotypic age acceleration value indicates faster biological aging.
“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,” said Makarem.
The AHA wants to help people get as many healthy years out of their lives as possible. The Life’s Essential Eight is a tool that can help achieve that. The eight items are simple enough to apply to anyone who wants to be stronger, better, and potentially younger for years to come.
“These findings help us understand the link between chronological and biological age and how healthy lifestyle habits can help us live longer. Everyone wants to live longer, yet more importantly, we want to live healthier longer so we can enjoy and have good quality of life for as many years as possible,” said Dr. Lloyd.