August 04, 2025
3 min read
Key takeaways:
- PREVENT risk age equations estimated discordance in chronological vs. heart age.
- Social determinants of health may identify groups with highest discordance.
Presence of CV risk factors may cause the heart to “age” faster than a person’s chronological age, and social determinants of health may exacerbate this heart age discordance, researchers reported.
For both men and women, a high proportion of people of Hispanic or Black race or with low educational attainment or low income had a heart age to chronological age discordance of 10 years or more, according to data published in JAMA Cardiology.
Understanding how a person’s heart age compared to their actual age and that of their peers may serve as a motivator to improve/adhere to lifestyle changes, the researchers wrote.
PREVENT risk age equations
“Risk age represents the age of a hypothetical person with the same predicted absolute risk but optimal risk factor levels. This may help individuals understand how their risk compares with chronological age (is my risk age older than my actual chronological age?) and may motivate adherence to lifestyle modifications or guideline-recommended preventive care based on absolute risk,” Vaishnavi Krishnan, researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago and medical student at Boston University School of Medicine, and colleagues wrote. “While risk age was previously developed for the Framingham CVD risk model, this has not been updated for the Predicting Risk of Cardiovascular Disease Events (PREVENT) equations. Therefore, we developed PREVENT risk age equations and describe its distribution in the U.S. population.”
The researchers calculated PREVENT risk age using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2011 to March 2020) of 14,140 nonpregnant adults aged 30 to 79 years without CVD and estimated the proportion of individuals with age discordance as well as overall average age discordance.
Heart and chronological age discordance
The present analysis was representative of approximately 138 million U.S. adults.
The mean PREVENT risk age among women was 55.4 years and mean chronological age was 51.3 years. Mean PREVENT risk age among men was 56.7 years and mean chronological age was 49.7 years.
PREVENT risk age and chronological age discordance varied across subgroups.
The proportion of men with a discordance of more than 10 years for their hearts was highest among those self-reported Hispanic adults (32%), self-reported Black adults (34.7%), those with a high school education or less (32.5%) and those with a family income to poverty ratio of 2 or less (35.4%).
Similarly, the proportion of women with a discordance of more than 10 years for their hearts was highest among those self-reported Hispanic adults (19%), self-reported Black adults (26%), those with a high school education or less (22.8%) and those with a family income to poverty ratio of 2 or less (24.4%).
“On average, PREVENT risk age was older than chronological age, with greater discordance among those with adverse social factors,” the researchers wrote. “PREVENT risk age and absolute risk together may offer an intuitive approach for communicating CVD risk, can be automated into electronic health records, and could help clinicians and patients in shared decision-making for preventive therapies.”
In a related editorial, Mohammad Al Mouslmani, MD, MPH, hospitalist at Yale New Haven Hospital, and colleagues discussed how peer-to-peer comparison of chronological and PREVENT risk age discordance may serve as a motivator for lifestyle changes among patients.
“By translating cardiovascular risk into an age-based metric, tools like PREVENT risk age offer patients a more personally meaningful reflection of their health,” the authors wrote. “When individuals see that their heart is aging faster than their peers’, it can transform abstract probabilities into urgent motivation. Theodore Roosevelt famously warned that comparison is the thief of joy; in the realm of cardiovascular prevention, it may also be a powerful spark for change.”
The researchers developed an online tool to communicate PREVENT risk age, which can be found here.
Reference:
Sources/Disclosures
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Disclosures:
Al Mouslmani and Krishnan report no relevant financial disclosures. Please see the study and related editorial for all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.
