Couples often have similar CV risk factors
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Within couples, there was often similar adherence or nonadherence to ideal CV health behaviors, which may represent an opportunity for targeted risk factor modification, researchers reported.
“Couples should be aware of each other’s CV risk factors, in particular for lifestyle behaviors such as poor food choices and physical inactivity,” Samia Mora, MD, MHS, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Lipid Metabolomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told Healio. “Clinicians should ask and assess about CV risk not just in their patient, but also their partners. CV prevention efforts and programs should not focus on individual health but the health of bigger units that include partners and households or even communities, in particular for targeting poor CV behaviors. Employers should expand prevention programs to include partners and households.”
For this analysis, 5,364 U.S. couples (54% white; median age, 50 years for men and 47 years for women) participated in an employer-sponsored health assessment program administered by Quest Diagnostics. Investigators assessed the rate of within-couple concordance of the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 (smoking status, BMI, exercise, diet, total cholesterol, BP and fasting glucose). For each category, participants received a CV health score of ideal, intermediate or poor.
Overall ideal and poor concordance
Researchers observed that within-couple concordance ranged from 53% (95% CI, 52-54) for cholesterol to 95% for diet (95% CI, 94-95).
According to the study, for 79% of couples (95% CI, 78-80) both were in a nonideal category according to a CV health score based on the seven behaviors. This finding was predominately driven by unhealthy diet (94%; 95% CI, 93-94) and inadequate exercise (53%; 95% CI, 52-55).
Among most couples, both members were in the ideal category for smoking status (60%; 95% CI, 59-61) and fasting glucose (56%; 95% CI, 55-58).
With the exception of total cholesterol, when one member of a couple was in the ideal category of a Life’s Simple 7 parameter, their partner was more likely to be ideal in the same parameter, with ORs ranging from 1.3 for BP (95% CI, 1.1-1.5) to 10.6 for diet (95% CI, 7.4-15.3).
“We found that within-couple concordance (ie, the percent of couples who were both in an ideal category or both in a nonideal category) was common (> 50%) for all Life’s Simple 7 factors as well as the CV health score. Behaviors that affect risk (smoking status, diet and physical activity) had particularly high concordance (> 69%), consistent with a previous study that investigated within-couple concordance of these behaviors,” Dov Shiffman, PhD, scientific fellow at Quest Diagnostics in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues wrote. “A total of 79% of the couples were in the nonideal category for the CV health score, a result associated with lifestyle behaviors.”
A longer subanalysis
Moreover, a 5-year longitudinal analysis of 2,186 couples found modest improvements changes in ideal BP concordance (55%; 95% CI, 53-57; to 59%; 95% CI, 57-61) and reductions in the prevalence of ideal fasting glucose (64%; 95% CI, 62-66; to 59%; 95% CI, 57-61).
Investigators observed no change in any other factors.
“While we knew that couples’ health would be related, we were surprised by the high concordance of nonideal CV health metrics (four of five couples),” Mora said in an interview. “But the good news is that when one member of the couple improved their health and attained ideal CV health (eg, quitting smoking, losing weight, becoming more physically active or improving their dietary pattern) the prior year, the other member of the couple subsequently improved their health as well.
“Future studies should examine whether programs that focus on couples-targeted or household-targeted prevention and lifestyle modification may help improve the success of cardiovascular prevention efforts,” Mora told Healio.
Reference:
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts