How Fast Is Your Heart Aging? Researchers Created a New Online Tool to Help You Find Out That could make it easier for people to understand their heart health, experts said
A new "heart age" calculator presents a person's heart disease risk as a relative age, rather than a percentage
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- Researchers have created a tool to help people calculate their “heart age.”
- The tool helps people see their heart disease risk as an “age,” rather than a risk percentage.
- This could help people better understand their heart health, though some experts say the heart age calculator has possible shortcomings.
How old is your heart? Researchers have created a new online tool to help people find out.
In a new study, published on July 30 in JAMA Cardiology, researchers shared their newly developed “heart age” tool, which calculates each person’s chances of getting cardiovascular disease (CVD) as a relative age, rather than a risk percentage.
The heart age calculator could help people better understand (and prioritize) their heart health, experts said.
If your heart age is significantly higher than your chronological age, that should spur a conversation with your doctor, study author Sadiya Khan, MD, professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told Health.
Calculating Heart Health Risk in a New Way
This heart age calculator isn’t a novel way to test for overall CVD risk—rather, it’s based on the American Heart Association’s Predicting Risk of Cardiovascular Events (PREVENT) tool. It presents a person with their risk of developing a heart attack, heart failure, or stroke in the next decade as a percentage, Khan explained.
However, this “10-year risk can be abstract,” she said. “We developed the heart age equation to translate this risk into a more relatable number.”
For a 45-year-old woman with diabetes and borderline high cholesterol, for example:
- She may have a 3.9% 10-year risk of CVD, according to the PREVENT tool.
- Per the heart age calculator, her predicted heart age is 60.
Both the PREVENT and heart age calculators are meant for people who don’t currently have heart failure or CVD, and are based on the following metrics:
- Sex
- Age
- HDL and total cholesterol
- Systolic blood pressure
- Diabetes diagnosis
- Smoking status
- Estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), a marker of kidney health
- Anti-hypertensive medication and lipid-lowering medication status
- Body mass index (PREVENT tool only)
How Much Older Are Americans’ Hearts?
Khan and the other researchers tested their heart age calculator on more than 14,000 American adults. The participants were 30–79 years old with no history of CVD.
On average, the results showed most people’s heart ages were higher than their actual age.
| Average Chronological Age | Average Heart Age | |
| Women | 51.3 years old | 55.4 years old |
| Men | 49.7 years old | 56.7 years old |
The gaps between heart age and chronological age were greater for Black and Hispanic participants, those who were middle-aged, and people with lower education levels and incomes.
What constitutes a “good” or “bad” heart age depends on the person. But in general, if your heart age is younger than your actual age—or, just a couple years older—that’s a good sign, Khan said.
But if your heart age is five or 10 years older than your chronological age, that may indicate that you need treatment, she explained.
In most of these cases, a much higher heart age is linked to suboptimal blood pressure and cholesterol—factors that can be modified with both lifestyle and medication, Khan added.
Using the Heart Age Calculator in the Real World
Though there are many CVD risk calculators out there, many experts agreed with the study authors—the heart age calculator may be particularly helpful.
Being able to see heart age and chronological age side by side makes heart health easier to understand, Nour Makarem, PhD, cardiovascular epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told Health.
Plus, the risk percentage can be confusing without more context.
For example, having a 10-year risk of CVD over 20% is considered high, but someone might see that number and assume they’re in the clear (there’s an 80% chance of no cardiac events), said Parveen Garg, MD, preventative cardiologist and associate professor of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.
Using heart age and relative risk of CVD together may be the “most effective way” to communicate a person’s heart health, he told Health.
The heart age tool will be especially “beneficial if it can be integrated into electronic health records,” so clinicians can track it over time, Keith Ferdinand, MD, director of Preventative Cardiology at the Tulane University School of Medicine, told Health.
Heart Age May Not Be the Perfect Metric
However, some experts are more skeptical.
For one, it may take a while for a new tool like this to be readily used in clinical practice. Plus, doctors already have a host of other heart health scoring metrics, Michael MIller, MD, cardiologist at Penn Medicine, told Health.
There’s also no concrete proof that presenting CVD risk as a heart age actually makes people more likely to improve their heart health. What would be more persuasive, Miller explained, would be a study that investigated whether people who knew their heart age had fewer cardiac events over time than their peers.
Khan said she plans to study whether heart age improves cardiovascular outcomes, but Miller isn’t confident there’d be any difference.
“We know that treating high blood pressure, high glucose, and high cholesterol is important, irrespective of heart age,” he said.
Miller also was concerned that a lower-than-expected heart age could give a patient a false sense of security about their health.
Nathan Wong, PhD, director of the Heart Disease Prevention Program at UC Irvine, agreed, particularly because the heart age calculator is fairly limited.
It doesn’t integrate family history, pregnancy-related factors, body mass index (BMI), and other heart health biomarkers, which “could result in a heart age that is substantially lower or higher than what is estimated,” Wong told Health.
Got Your Heart Age? Now Here’s What to Do With It
When it comes to heart age, it’s important to remember that the tool is just one way to predict your CVD risk. Plus, that number isn’t necessarily providing new information, said Garg.
“It simply provides an alternative, potentially more understandable way, to communicate CVD risk to patients when compared to absolute risk alone,” he explained.
But if you do want to give the new tool a try, make sure to have your average blood pressure, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, and eGFR levels available so you can get a reading. These metrics are usually evaluated by a healthcare professional; however, if you have recent tests or approximations, you should be able to calculate your heart age at home.
If you do have a higher heart age than your chronological age, it may be worth speaking with your doctor about how you can go about lowering it. You can do that by addressing CVD risk factors, which include:
- High blood pressure
- High cholesterol
- Smoking
- Kidney disease
- Obesity
- High alcohol intake
- Lack of sleep
- Diet high in added sugar, fat, and salt
- Sedentary lifestyle
Julia Landwehr
Julia is the associate news editor for Health, where she edits and publishes news articles on trending health and wellness topics. Her work has been featured in The Heights, an independent student newspaper at Boston College, and Minnesota Monthly.
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This story originally appeared on: Health News - Author:Kristen Fischer
