We’ve heard people called “old souls.” Now, they may fall in the category of “old hearts.”
That’s the idea behind a new project at Northwestern called the “PREVENT Risk Age Calculator”, which is intended to provide a personalized estimate of your heart health, reflected in a calculated “heart age”. Input key medical information including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, smoking habits and the like, and after a few seconds of work, it spits out an estimate of the age of your heart, and your risk for cardiovascular diseases. We did it, and suffice it to say, our heart is not a superstar. Give it a try, and check back here when you’re finished.
…and take that finding with a grain of salt. This is a communications tool, not a diagnostic one, designed to help patients understand the risks that they face in a more graphic and personal manner. According to the researchers, the goal of this tool is to “help doctors and patients discuss risk for heart disease more effectively so we can better inform what therapies can prevent heart attacks, stroke or heart failure events from ever happening,”
And it is a good thing too, since our collective heart health is not terribly age appropriate. The Northwestern researchers used data from 14,000 individuals aged 30 to 79, who had no prior history of cardiovascular disease, and ran it through their heart calculator. The results weren’t great: women on average had a heart age of 55.4, compared to a chronological age of 51.3. For men, the age gap was even wider: an average heart age of 56.7 compared to an average chronological age of 49.7. Among men with a high school education or less, nearly one-third had a heart age more than 10 years older than their actual age.
He may not have been a fancy researcher at Northwestern, but Frank Sinatra got it, in his song “Young-At-Heart”:
And if you should survive to a hundred and five
Look at all you'll derive out of being alive
And here is the best part, you have a head start
If you are among the very young at heart