You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Cardiac risk factors and prevention
Original research article
Association of Life's Simple 7 and presence of cardiovascular disease in general Australians
  1. Yang Peng and
  2. Zhiqiang Wang
  1. Faculty of Medicine, Centre for Chronic Disease, University of Queensland, Herston, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Yang Peng; y.peng{at}uq.edu.au

Abstract

Objective The American Heart Association developed Life’s Simple 7 to define and monitor cardiovascular health (CVH), but their contributions to cardiovascular disease (CVD) in general Australians are still unclear. Our study aimed to evaluate the separate and combined effects of Life’s Simple 7 on CVD among Australians.

Methods We performed a cross-sectional study based on 7499 adults (≥18 years) who have been tested for total cholesterol and fasting plasma glucose as part of the 2011–2012 Australian Health Survey. Poisson regression analyses were used to estimate the incidence rate ratios and population attributable fractions of those metrics to CVD prevalence. Participants were classified into three CVH status groups based on the number of ideal metrics: inadequate (0–2), average (3–4) and optimal (5–7). Logistic regression analyses were performed to illustrate the relationships between overall CVH and CVD prevalence.

Results 2100 (21.0%) participants were having CVD. Smoking, elevated body mass index, blood pressure, total cholesterol, fasting plasma glucose and physical inactivity were observed as significant indicators of CVD. Compared with the inadequate category, participants in the optimal and average category have a 66% (adjusted OR, 0.34; 95% CI 0.22 to 0.54) and a 33% (adjusted OR, 0.67; 95% CI 0.56 to 0.81) lower CVD risk. One more ideal metric was associated with a 21% reduced CVD risk (adjusted OR, 0.79; 95% CI 0.73 to 0.84).

Conclusions We have identified several modifiable risk factors and contributors of CVD in general Australians. The improvement of overall CVH may also reduce CVD risk.

  • epidemiology
  • coronory artery disease
  • public health

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/openhrt-2017-000622

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors YP and ZW: concept/design. YP: data analysis/interpretation, drafting article. ZW: critical revision of article. YP and ZW: approval of article.

    • Funding This study was supported by the University of Queensland International Scholarship (No 44078179) to YP and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (No APP1042343) to ZW. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Ethics approval The School of Medicine Low Risk Ethical Review Committee in the University of Queensland.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement Any requests for data sharing should be made to the corresponding author.