Tag: Heart

 

By David Nield
Many different factors play into your risk of a heart attack, stroke, and heart failure, and a lot of them involve lifestyle choices most people can do something about – including three small upgrades in sleep, diet, and physical activity highlighted in a new study.

Led by a team from the University of Sydney, the researchers behind the study wanted to look at how these three factors, in combination, affect cardiovascular health, after previous research had linked them to better heart health individually.

Based on an analysis of 53,242 participants with an average age of 63, the data showed that adding 11 more minutes of sleep, an extra 4.5 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, and an additional quarter cup of vegetables each day was associated with a 10 percent reduction over eight years in the risk of major cardiovascular events, including heart attacks, stroke and heart failure.

While the study can’t prove cause and effect, the data indicated a positive correlation between these three behaviors and lower overall risk – more evidence that a healthier life can start with some relatively minor changes.

“We show that combining small changes in a few areas of our lives can have a surprisingly large positive impact on our cardiovascular health,” says nutritional scientist Nicholas Koemel, from the University of Sydney.

“This is very encouraging news because making a few small, combined changes is likely more achievable and sustainable for most people when compared with attempting major changes in a single behavior.”

Data for the study were gathered through the use of wearable devices (for sleep and activity) and questionnaires (for diet). The researchers accounted for numerous other influential risk factors, including age, sex, and smoking and drinking habits.

The researchers charted lifestyle differences in sleep, physical activity, and nutrition (SPAN) against the risk of major cardiovascular events. (Koemel et al., Eur. J. Prev. Cardiol., 2026)

If you want something bigger to aim for, the optimal combination of behaviors was 8-9 hours of sleep a night, 42 minutes or more of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day, and a modest diet quality score.

That combination was linked to a 57 percent reduction in major cardiovascular events over the eight years of patient follow-up, compared to the least optimal health profile in the study.

Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity is something along the lines of a brisk walk, going up a flight of stairs, or carrying the shopping.

Diet quality, meanwhile, was ranked based on a higher intake of fruit, vegetables, fish, and whole grains, and lower amounts of processed meats and sugary beverages.

But our health is complex, and the three factors (sleep, exercise, and diet) also affect one another: Better exercise can mean better sleep, for example. So the new analysis gives researchers some useful fresh insight into how these healthier behaviors work together to affect disease risk.

“We plan to build on these findings to develop new digital tools that support people in making positive lifestyle changes and establish sustained healthy habits,” says epidemiologist and senior author Emmanuel Stamatakis, from the University of Sydney.

“This will involve working closely with community members to make sure the tools are easy to use and can address the barriers we all face in making tweaks to our day-to-day routines.”

Cardiovascular diseases remain the leading cause of death worldwide, and experts are continuing to uncover more about the contributors and risk factors involved.

There’s an urgent need to better understand how major cardiovascular events are triggered and how we might be able to predict them with greater accuracy in the future.

We’re at the stage now where many of the warning signs can be spotted early, and these latest findings add to our knowledge of how to minimize heart health risk in practical ways. Bundling some of these risk factors together reveals that smaller, more achievable changes can be helpful, too.

“Making even modest shifts in our daily routines is likely to have cardiovascular benefits as well as create opportunities for further changes in the long run,” says Koemel.

“I would encourage people not to overlook the importance of making a small change or two to your daily routine, no matter how small they may seem.”

The research has been published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

 

By Clarissa Brincat
Men’s heart health tends to decline earlier in life, and the difference is driven largely by coronary heart disease, which appears roughly a decade sooner in men than in women.

A new analysis finds men consistently have a higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease after age 35 than women do.

Men tend to develop cardiovascular disease about seven years earlier than women do, according to a new study.

The difference is driven largely by coronary heart disease, which is caused by plaque buildup in the arteries within the heart. It appears roughly a decade sooner in men than in women.

Cardiovascular disease is an umbrella term that includes conditions such as coronary heart disease, heart failure and stroke. It remains the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States, but it doesn’t manifest at the same time in both sexes.

The new research, published Jan. 28 in the Journal of the American Heart Association, drew on data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study, which followed more than 5,000 Black and white adults across the United States for over 30 years.

The researchers found that the risk of cardiovascular disease for men and women begins to diverge around age 35. From that point through middle age, men consistently had a higher risk of cardiovascular disease than women did.

That remained true even when the researchers adjusted for common risk factors, such as body mass index (BMI), blood pressure, blood sugar levels, physical activity, smoking status, diet quality and levels of non-HDL cholesterol (the “bad” kind).

This suggests that some other biological or social factors may contribute to making men more vulnerable to heart disease at younger ages, the study authors say.

“The study supports that men waiting until middle age to assess cardiovascular risk miss a critical window for prevention,” said Dr. Brett Sealove, chair of cardiology at Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. Men should begin routine heart health screenings in their 30s and focus on managing modifiable risk factors, such as their diet, exercise habits and smoking, he told Live Science in an email.

However, Sealove noted that these new findings should not lead clinicians or patients to overlook women’s risk of developing heart disease before age 65.

Dr. Kim Eagle, a cardiologist and director of the University of Michigan Health Frankel Cardiovascular Center, echoed that concern. “The study is not practice-changing and I worry that many may conclude that heart disease is predominantly a male problem,” Eagle, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

Eagle pointed out that the study found little to no difference between the age at which men and women developed heart failure or stroke. Furthermore, “it is likely that women have an acceleration of heart disease after menopause compared to men which is not captured in this study,” he said. “Heart disease kills more women than any other illness. We should not downplay its importance.”

The timeline of heart disease
The CARDIA cohort included 5,115 participants from four U.S. cities: Chicago; Minneapolis; Birmingham, Alabama; and Oakland, California. The participants were between 18 and 30 years old when the study began, between 1985 and 1986, and they were followed until August 2020, making the oldest participants about 65 by the end. The researchers collected health information through medical exams and surveys at baseline and then at two, five, seven, 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 years into the study.

About 5% of the men had developed some form of cardiovascular diseases by age 50, but for women, that same incidence rate was reached around age 57. The largest sex-based gap appeared in coronary heart disease: Men reached a 2% risk of having coronary heart disease 10 years earlier than women did.

By contrast, the researchers found little to no difference between men and women in the age at which stroke occurred. Their heart failure risk was also similar for much of adulthood..

“The long duration of the study coupled with some diversity of people and the fairly large cohort provides us with valuable data on how cardiovascular health changes from the start of adulthood to middle age,” Sealove said.

That said, as an observational study, the research cannot prove what factors cause men to develop heart disease earlier than women do, Sealove noted. Rather, it can only draw a link between sex and heart disease risk. In addition, public health guidelines, diagnostic tools and treatments changed substantially over the study period, which could have influenced when the disease was detected or treated, he noted.

Additionally, Eagle found the study’s sample size small, and he also pointed out that it did not account for pregnancy-related complications or menopause, or for forms of heart disease that disproportionately affect women, such as conditions involving the smaller coronary arteries. (The authors didn’t explicitly note how many of the women in the study were menopausal by its end.)

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The study authors suggested that differences in health care use may contribute to the difference in heart disease seen between the sexes. For example, women ages 18 to 44 attend roughly four times as many preventive health care visits as men do, in part due to seeking gynecologic and obstetric care, they wrote in the paper. Encouraging preventive care among young adult men may represent an important opportunity to reduce cardiovascular risk earlier in life, they suggested.

“The relationship between gender and heart disease risk is complex and changes over a lifetime,” Sealove said. While men appear to be more vulnerable to earlier heart disease, women’s risk rises sharply after menopause as levels of protective estrogen decline.

“The study doesn’t show that one gender is more at risk overall,” he said. Rather, it highlights when risk peaks across a lifetime.

“At the end of the day, it is important to know that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death and disability in women and men,” Sealove said, “and everyone should receive regular health screenings and live a heart healthy lifestyle.”

Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Article Sources
Freedman, A. A., Colangelo, L. A., Ning, H., Borrowman, J. D., Lewis, C. E., Schreiner, P. J., Khan, S. S., & Lloyd‐Jones, D. M. (2026). Sex differences in age of onset of premature cardiovascular disease and subtypes: The coronary artery risk development in young adults study. Journal of the American Heart Association. https://doi.org/10.1161/jaha.125.044922

(Clarissa Brincat
Live Science Contributor

Clarissa Brincat is a freelance writer specializing in health and medical research. After completing an MSc in chemistry, she realized she would rather write about science than do it. She learned how to edit scientific papers in a stint as a chemistry copyeditor, before moving on to a medical writer role at a healthcare company. Writing for doctors and experts has its rewards, but Clarissa wanted to communicate with a wider audience, which naturally led her to freelance health and science writing. Her work has also appeared in Medscape, HealthCentral and Medical News Today.)