This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Healthy vascular aging possible with favorable lifestyle
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Healthy arterial aging is possible in adults younger than 70 years, despite confounding factors of a Western lifestyle, so targeting modifiable factors may prevent or delay vascular aging and the associated risk for CVD, according to findings published in Hypertension.
“Age-related increases in arterial stiffness and [BP] are ... widely accepted as an inevitable part of the aging process in acculturated societies, further exemplified by the widespread use of the term essential hypertension. However, age-associated increase in [BP] is not common in some populations leading traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles (although these data are limited by modest sample sizes),” Teemu J. Niiranen, MD, PhD, of the NHLBI’s and Boston University’s Framingham Heart Study, and colleagues wrote. “The prevalence, correlates and prognosis of healthy vascular aging (ie, lack of age-related increases in arterial stiffness and [BP]) in a contemporary Western cohort are incompletely understood.”
Niiranen and colleagues used data from the Framingham Heart Study to determine whether arterial aging was associated with specific lifestyle factors.
Healthy vascular aging was defined as absence of hypertension and pulse wave velocity < 7.6 m/s.
Vascular aging statistics
Of the 3,196 participants (mean age, 62 years; 56% women) in the study, 17.7% (n = 566) had healthy vascular aging. In participants aged 50 to 59 years, 30.3% had healthy vascular aging compared with 1% in participants older than 70 years.
Participants with healthy vascular aging were more likely to be younger, to be women, to have lower BMI, to use lipid-lowering drugs and to not have diabetes (P < .001 for all).
Participants who achieved a score of 6 from the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 score — which includes fasting blood glucose, cholesterol, resting BP, BMI, self-reported smoking status, dietary quality and physical activity — were 10 times more likely to have healthy vascular aging than those who achieved a score of 0 to 1.
Healthy aging arteries were associated with a significant decrease in the risk for developing CVD during a follow-up of 9.6 years, after adjustment for traditional CVD risk factors including BP (HR = 0.45; 95% CI, 0.26-0.77).
“The concept of [healthy vascular aging] may not have received notable attention previously because of the strong correlation between age and arterial stiffness,” the researchers wrote. “A large part of recent research on vascular aging has, therefore, focused on early vascular aging, an even more rapid course of vascular aging that results in premature CVD manifestations. However, both past and more contemporary research suggest that vascular aging, just as isolated systolic hypertension, should no longer be considered a part of normal aging.”
More research needed
In an accompanying editorial, Gemma Currie, MBChB, and Christian Delles, MD, of the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, U.K., wrote: “Niiranen [and colleagues] have provided an important piece of research by defining some of the factors that are associated with [healthy vascular aging] and probably even more so by identifying what we do not know about [healthy vascular aging] yet. The fact that the Framingham cohort may not be fully representative of the general population in the United States and elsewhere probably limits the generalizability of the results.”
Currie and Delles also encouraged future studies to look at relatively healthy populations to better understand protective factors. – by Cassie Homer
Disclosure: Niiranen, Currie and Delles report no relevant financial disclosures. One researcher reports being the owner of Cardiovascular Engineering and receiving honoraria from Merck, Novartis, Phillips and Servier.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts