Benefits from heart-healthy lifestyle may be related to lowering biological age
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- Adherence to the AHA’s Life’s Essential 8 conferred lower CVD and mortality risk.
- Some of the benefits were mediated by the impact on biological age and varied across different scoring algorithms.
Adherence to a heart-healthy lifestyle confers cardiovascular health benefits, and part of the reason may be due to the effect on biological age, researchers reported.
A new analysis of the Framingham Heart Study cohorts to investigate the link between epigenetic age scores and the protective CV health benefits of the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
“Differential DNA methylation at > 1,000 5-C-phosphate-G-3 (CpGs) (ie, DNA methylation sites) has been shown to be associated with CVD and all-cause mortality,” Madeleine Carbonneau, BA, research fellow in the population sciences branch, division of intramural research at the NHLBI/NIH, and colleagues wrote. “Because recognition of the relationship between DNA methylation and morbidity and mortality has grown, various DNA methylation-based epigenetic scores have been developed to predict age and age-associated phenotypes. These epigenetic scores have often been characterized as biological aging biomarkers, with older epigenetic age hypothesized to represent faster biological aging, although the definition of biological aging has not been uniformly agreed upon.”
Carbonneau and colleagues analyzed data from 5,682 participants from the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort from 2005 to 2008 and Third Generation cohort from 2008 to 2011.
Each component of the Life’s Essential 8 was scored from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating better adherence to AHA recommendations, and the overall score is the unweighted average of each component’s score.
The researchers implemented four DNA methylation-based epigenetic age biomarker scores — DunedinPACE, PhenoAge, DNAmTL and GrimAge — to assess their associations between the Life’s Essential 8 score and CVD, CVD death and all-cause mortality.
The researchers reported that every 1 standard deviation increase in the Life’s Essential 8 score was associated with a 35% lower risk for incident CVD, a 36% lower risk for CVD death and a 29% lower risk for all-cause mortality (P for all < .0001).
The lower risk for CVD, CVD death and all-cause mortality associated with higher Life’s Essential 8 score was partially mediated by epigenetic age scores, and varied among the four scores in the present analysis.
The observed mediation by epigenetic age score was significant and ranged from 3% to 21% for incident CVD risk; 14% to 21% for CVD death risk; and 6% to 65% for all-cause mortality.
“While there are a few DNA methylation-based, biological age calculators commercially available, we don’t have a good recommendation regarding whether people need to know their epigenetic age,” Jiantao Ma, PhD, assistant professor in the division of nutrition epidemiology and data science at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said in a press release. “Our message is that everyone should be mindful of the eight heart disease and stroke health factors: eat healthy foods; be more active; quit tobacco; get healthy sleep; manage weight; and maintain healthy cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure levels.”
Reference:
- Heart-healthy behaviors may help reverse rapid cell aging. https://newsroom.heart.org/news/heart-healthy-behaviors-may-help-reverse-rapid-cell-aging. Published May 29, 2024. Accessed May 29, 2024.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts