Keeping your heart healthy is something many people think about only later in life, but new research suggests that what you do for your heart over many years really matters.
Scientists have found that your long-term habits, not just your current health, can strongly affect your chances of developing serious diseases.
To better understand this, researchers looked at a tool created by the American Heart Association called Life’s Essential 8, often shortened to LE8.
This tool gives people a score from 0 to 100 based on eight important parts of health.
These include body weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, physical activity, diet, smoking habits, and sleep. A higher score means better heart health.
Many earlier studies only looked at this score at one moment in time.
However, health is not something that stays the same. It changes as people age, as their habits change, and as life becomes busier or more stressful. Because of this, researchers wanted to understand how heart health over many years affects future disease risk.
To answer this question, they used data from the well-known Framingham Heart Study, which has followed people for decades. They focused on 3,231 participants and tracked their health over 25 years, from early adulthood into middle age. During this time, each person’s LE8 score was measured several times.
The researchers then looked at how these scores changed over time and calculated what they called a “cumulative score.” This means they considered a person’s overall heart health across the entire 25-year period, not just one snapshot.
The results were very clear. The average score across all participants was 65, which suggests that many people had room for improvement. More importantly, people who had higher scores over time had a much lower risk of developing diseases later in life.
The most striking finding was related to heart disease. People in the highest group of long-term heart health scores had a 73 percent lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease compared to those in the lowest group. This shows that keeping good habits over many years can have a powerful protective effect.
The study also found something interesting about recent health. Even if two people had similar long-term scores, the person who had a better score at the most recent check had a lower risk of future disease. This suggests that improving your health at any stage can still make a difference.
The findings were published in the journal JACC: Advances. The researchers explained that many risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and excess weight, can slowly damage the body over time. At the same time, lifestyle habits like smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, and not getting enough sleep can add to this damage.
By looking at all these factors together, the LE8 score gives a simple way to understand overall heart health. It also shows that small improvements in different areas can add up over time.
When reviewing this study, it is clear that its strength lies in its long follow-up period and large group of participants. Tracking people for 25 years provides strong evidence about how long-term habits affect health.
However, the study is observational, which means it shows links but cannot prove direct cause and effect. There may also be other factors, such as income or access to healthcare, that influence both lifestyle and disease risk.
Even with these limitations, the message is strong and practical. Good health is not built in a day. It is the result of choices made again and again over many years.
Improving even one or two habits can raise your score and may lower your risk in the future.
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