AHA redefines cardiovascular health by adding sleep as new scoring tool
USA: American Heart Association has updated its checklist to measure cardiovascular health adding healthy sleep as essential for optimal cardiovascular health. Now it is called Life's Essential 8™.
Other health and lifestyle factors in the checklist, which were part of the previous, 7-item scoring tool, are nicotine exposure, physical activity, diet, weight, blood glucose, cholesterol and blood pressure.
The new Life's Essential 8 score helps identify individual and large group differences in cardiovascular health (CVH), says a study published in Circulation. The study found that based on the Life's Essential 8 checklist about 80% of people in the U.S. have low to moderate cardiovascular health.
"In the US population, overall CVH remains well below optimal levels, and there are both targeted and broad opportunities to monitor, improve, and preserve CVH across the life course in both individuals and the population," the researchers wrote in their study. The study provides details of the AHA's updated guidance to measure cardiovascular health adding healthy sleep as essential for ideal heart and brain health.
The "Life's Essential 8 score is an updated algorithm for quantifying cardiovascular health recently published by the American Heart Association (AHA). Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, and colleagues quantified US levels of CVH using the new score.
The study included non-pregnant, non-institutionalized individuals ages 2 through 79 years who were free of cardiovascular disease from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys in 2013-2018. The overall CVD score (range 0 [lowest] to 100 [highest]), was calculated for all the participants along with the score for each component of diet, nicotine exposure, physical activity (PA), body mass index (BMI), sleep duration, blood glucose, blood lipids, and blood pressure, using published AHA definitions.
Incorporation of sample weights was done in calculating prevalence estimates and standard errors using standard survey procedures. CVH scores were assessed across strata of age, race/ethnicity, sex, depression, and family income.
The findings of the study were as follows:
- There were 23,409 participants, representing 201,728,000 adults and 74,435,000 children.
- The overall mean CVH score was 64.7 among adults using all 8 metrics, and it was 65.5 for the 3 metrics available (diet, PA, and BMI) among children/adolescents ages 2 through 19 years.
- For adults, there were significant differences in mean overall CVH scores by sex (women: 67.0 vs. men: 62.5), age, and racial/ethnic group (range 59.7-68.5).
- Mean scores were lowest for diet, PA, and BMI metrics.
- There were large differences in mean scores across demographic groups for diet (range 23.8-47.7), nicotine exposure (range 63.1-85.0), blood glucose (range 65.7-88.1), and BP (range 49.5-84.0).
- In children, diet scores were low (mean 40.6) and were progressively lower in higher age groups (from 61.1 at ages 2-5 to 28.5 at ages 12-19); large differences were also noted in mean PA (range 63.1-88.3) and BMI (range 74.4-89.4) scores by sociodemographic group.
The researchers concluded by saying that "the new Life's Essential 8 score helps identify the large group and individual differences in CVH."
Reference:
Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, Hongyan Ning, Darwin Labarthe, LaPrincess Brewer, Garima Sharma, Wayne Rosamond, Randi E. Foraker, Terrie Black, Michael A. Grandner, Norrina B. Allen, Cheryl Anderson, Helen Lavretsky, Amanda M. Perak. Status of Cardiovascular Health in US Adults and Children Using the American Heart Association's New "Life's Essential 8" Metrics: Prevalence Estimates from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 2013-2018. Circulation, 2022; DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.060911.
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