Americans are faring worse at maintaining heart-healthy lifestyles than they were two decades ago, a new study has found.
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The American Heart Association has identified a set of lifestyle goals - called Life's Simple 7 - that contribute to ideal heart health. These include eating a balanced diet, being active, managing your weight, eliminating tobacco use, and maintaining ideal levels of blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure.
However, the percentage of participants in a decades-long heart study who met all seven goals declined during the last 20 years, despite years of public education urging healthy lifestyles, said study lead author Vanessa Xanthakis, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University.
In particular, people in the study typically failed to control their blood sugar and cholesterol levels, didn't keep their blood pressure in check and weighed too much.
Unfortunately, those factors also led to a greater risk of heart disease.
"We found that [for] people whose health scores dropped by about 15 percent, that had an effect of 1.6 times higher odds of having a precursor of cardiovascular disease, and also a 1.2 times higher rate of being diagnosed with overt clinical cardiovascular disease, compared with people who started out with and kept an ideal health score," Xanthakis said.
To see how well people were pursuing the heart-health goal, Xanthakis' team turned to the Framingham Heart Study, a long-term study of heart health involving several generations of people living in the town of Framingham, Mass.
The researchers assessed data for 3,460 people to determine how many were able to maintain an ideal cardiovascular health score.
According to the study, the proportion of people with an ideal score decreased from an already low 8.5 percent during the period 1991-1995, to just 5.8 percent during 2005-2008. ■
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