how old are you and how old are your blood vessels

It is a question gaining increasing attention as researchers look for more effective ways to communicate risk of cardiovascular disease to patients and to motivate them to make changes in their lives that can help prevent heart attacks, strokes and other serious heart-related problems later in life.

Several tools are available that enable doctors and patients to calculate vascular age. These suggest there can be a substantial difference between how old you are and how old your blood vessels are. For instance, the vascular age of a 35-year-old man who smokes and has diabetes, high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol could be as high as 76 years old—more than double his chronological age, according to a recent study. The arteries of a 30-year-old woman with similar risk factors could be equivalent to those of an average woman who is more than 80 years old.
Such a calculation "gives a sense that your risk-factor burden is making you age faster than you think you are," says Donald Lloyd-Jones, a preventive cardiologist at Northwestern University, Chicago, who co-authored the recent study, which appeared in the journal Circulation last August. "The more you can make it concrete, the better you can impart information about risk."


The good news, doctors say, is that by taking steps to reduce risk factors and the damage they inflict on arteries, it is possible to turn back the clock on vascular age.
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