How old or how young is your heart? A new tool may give patients the ability to find out. Scientists have developed a device which helps people estimate their heart risk later in life by calculating their heart's true age.
The new tool, known as the JBS3 risk calculator, can allow you to work out the true age of your heart. It looks at your cholesterol levels, your true age, whether or not you smoke, your weight, your height, and other factors in order to find out how healthy your heart might be.
So what does this tell you? The calculator then predicts how much longer you can expect to live before you have a heart attack or stroke in comparison to someone without these particular factors, according to the Business Standard. Yet these results aren't set in stone. For example, quitting smoking can lower the age of your heart.
This new calculator is just another tool to help people combat heart disease. Already, heart disease deaths have almost halved over the past 40 to 50 years-particularly in high income countries, according to On Medica. That said, cardiovascular disease (CVD) still remains a huge risk for people later in life.
"Most surveys suggest that the majority of the public underestimate their lifetime risk of developing and dying of CVD, consider cancer to be a greater threat despite robust evidence to the contrary," write the authors of the new study, according to On Medica. "It is important to emphasize that, for the majority, the strong message will be the potential gains from an early and sustained change to a healthier lifestyle rather than prescription of drugs."
The findings give people another tool to judge the health of their heart. This, in turn, may help spur lifestyle changes, such as eating properly and exercising more regularly, that can help improve their heart health.
