Your heart may be older than you think — and the number could predict disease risk

Your heart may be older than you are, according to new research.

A study from Northwestern Medicine found that most American adults have a “heart age” that is several years older than their chronological age.

The gap is wider among men than women, the researchers found, as well as in Black and Hispanic people and those with lower education and income, according to a university press release.

To help people assess their own cardiac age, the researchers developed a free online tool that makes the calculation.

Using guidelines from the American Heart Association, the PREVENT Risk Age Calculator determines a person’s heart disease risk based on several factors, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, smoking status, current medications and the presence of diabetes.

The risk level is provided as an age rather than a percentage.

“Heart age, or PREVENT age, may be particularly useful for patients and clinicians and be more effective in preventing heart disease,” senior author Dr. Sadiya Khan, the Magerstadt professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who led the development of the PREVENT equations, told Fox News Digital.

“It translates complex information about the risk of heart attack, stroke or heart failure over the next 10 years into a number that is easier to understand and compare with one we are all familiar with — your actual age.”

The goal is for the tool to help doctors and patients discuss heart disease risk more effectively, helping to ensure the right therapies to prevent heart attacks, stroke or heart failure events, according to Khan.

The researchers tested the tool on more than 14,100 American adults across the U.S., ranging in age from 30 to 79, who had no history of heart disease.

The adults’ data was obtained from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which was gathered from 2011 to March 2020.

Women had an average heart age of 55.4, nearly four years higher than their average chronological age of 51.3.

Men had an average heart age of 56.7, seven years higher than their chronological age of 49.7.

More than 22% of women and 33% of men with a high-school education or less had a heart age that exceeded their chronological age by more than 10 years.

The findings were published in JAMA Cardiology on Wednesday.

The hope is that more information about heart health risk could increase preventive care, Khan said, as heart disease has been the country’s leading cause of death for over 100 years.

“Many people who should be on medicine to lower their risk for heart attack, stroke or heart failure are not on these medications,” the preventive cardiologist noted. 

“We hope this new heart age calculator will help support discussions about prevention and ultimately improve health for all people.”

This may be even more important in younger people, Khan noted, as they are less likely to be aware of their heart disease risk.

The calculator is not intended to serve as a substitute for in-person assessments by a physician.

One limitation of the study, the researchers noted, is that “the definition of optimal risk may influence the calculation of PREVENT risk age.”

“Alternatively, population-based percentiles of risk can provide a complementary approach to communicating risk, but these are influenced by suboptimal population health,” they wrote. 

“This type of tool needs to be tested widely to determine if it is more readily understood,” Khan told Fox News Digital.

Future studies are needed to measure the impact of heart age on healthy lifestyle changes, preventive therapies and patient outcomes, the team concluded.