Optimizing CV health behaviors may lower risk for CVD and cancer
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Improvement in the American Heart Association’s Life’s Simple 7 CV health score was associated with lower risk for cancer and CVD during nearly 25 years of follow-up, researchers reported.
An analysis of the long-term French GAZEL study was published in JACC: CardioOncology.
Image: Adobe Stock
“In this community-based longitudinal study with almost 25 years of follow-up, better CV health and an improvement in CV health in midlife were associated with a lower risk of cancer,” Thomas van Sloten, MD, PhD, of the Université Paris Cité, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale in Paris, and colleagues wrote. “These associations existed beyond the smoking metric.”
The GAZEL study
For this study, van Sloten and colleagues used data from 13,933 participants in the GAZEL study who were free of cancer and CVD at baseline (mean age, 45 years; 24% women) to evaluate the association between change in AHA Life’s Simple 7 CV health score over 7 years and incident cancer and CV events from baseline in 1989-1990 to 2015.
Cancers of interest included breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer and a category of other cancers including renal cancer, bladder cancer, rectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, lymphoid chronic leukemia, thyroid cancer, liver cancer and cancer of an unspecified site.
The AHA Life’s Simple 7 CV health score ranged between 0 and 14 points and included poor, intermediate and ideal levels of smoking, physical activity, BMI, diet, BP, diabetes status and lipids, according to the study.
The GAZEL cohort is a prospective cohort study initiated in 1989 that recruited employees of France’s national electricity and gas company (Electricité de France-Gaz de France) to evaluate determinants of multiple adult chronic diseases, with an emphasis on occupational factors.
The median follow-up was 24.8 years.
In 1989-1990, every 1-point increase in the AHA Life’s Simple 7 CV health score was associated with a 9% reduced risk for any cancer (HR = 0.91; 95% CI, 0.88-0.93) and a 20% reduced risk for cardiac events (HR = 0.8; 95% CI, 0.77-0.83), according to the researchers.
Over 7 years, every 1-point increase in the AHA Life’s Simple 7 CV health score was associated with a 5% reduced risk for any cancer (HR = 0.95; 95% CI, 0.92-0.99) and a 7% reduced risk for cardiac events (HR = 0.93; 95% CI, 0.88-0.98), according to the study.
Van Sloten and colleagues noted that these observations remained after the smoking metric was omitted from the AHA Life’s Simple 7 CV health score.
“The lower risk of cancer associated with higher CV health in prior studies and with a change in CV health, as newly shown in the present study, supports that primordial prevention may be a relevant strategy for the prevention of cancer,” the researchers wrote. “Although associations with cancer were of a lower magnitude than with cardiac events (confirming the prominence of primordial prevention for CVD), the results of the present study further indicate that primordial prevention may be a unified preventive strategy for CVD and cancer.”
Attaining and preserving CV health for cancer, CVD prevention
In a related editorial, Oluseye Ogunmoroti, MD, MPH, PhD student in the department of epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and Olatokunbo Osibogun, MBBS, MPH, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work at Florida International University in Miami, discussed how these findings could inform public health strategies to reduce cancer and CVD risk.
“It is a public health priority to develop effective strategies for cancer prevention and control to reduce the socioeconomic burden of cancer. With current evidence suggesting an inverse association between a favorable CV health profile and cancer incidence, the general public should be provided with educational resources on the importance of attaining and preserving optimal CV health throughout the life course,” the editorial authors wrote. “These data could be utilized to assess the CV health of patients and to track changes in CV health over time. As a supplement to guideline-recommended cancer screening tools, information on patients’ CV health could assist clinicians in risk prediction and may help initiate tailored behavioral changes in patients.”
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