These are the unhealthy habits that can accelerate heart aging.

Understanding heart health by determining its "age" in relation to chronological age has become a topic of interest among cardiologists, researchers, and physicians. This is especially true considering that common factors, such as stress , high-fat meals, and lack of exercise, could be accelerating the aging process. But what about the heart?

A team of scientists from the University of East Anglia (England) has recently published the results of a trial introducing a novel way to measure the functional age of the heart using cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which could help detect signs of heart disease earlier. The findings showed that unhealthy lifestyles, as well as some chronic diseases such as obesity and atrial fibrillation (AF), accelerate heart aging.

Traditionally, doctors analyze risk factors such as cholesterol and blood pressure to assess heart health. The ability to use MRI as a more efficient tool to better assess the functional age of the heart seems like a very good step.

“ Telling a 55-year-old that their heart looks like a 65-year-old’s can be a great encouragement to tighten blood pressure control, lose weight or exercise more,” says Pankaj Garg , a cardiologist at the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Medical School and the University Hospital of Norfolk and Norwich, and co-author of the paper published in the Open European Heart Journal .

Heart age is a medical estimate of the state of the cardiovascular system in relation to actual age. For example, if you're 40 years old, but have high blood pressure, are overweight, and don't exercise, your heart's heart age could be that of a person 60 or older. So no, having an aging heart has nothing to do with old age, as is commonly assumed.

Among the factors that increase the aging of our body's motor system, physical inactivity is one of the most notable, as regular exercise strengthens the heart muscle, improves circulation, and helps control risk factors such as obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Being aware that our heart needs us to change our habits could be a good impetus to take our cardiovascular health seriously.

The scientists started with a reference group of 191 healthy volunteers and compared them with a group of 366 people with at least one additional condition—such as hypertension, diabetes, or obesity . They also incorporated a small external cohort of 25 participants to preliminarily validate their findings.

The subjects came from five different centers across three countries , allowing the researchers to explore multiple parameters of heart structure and function in detail. From this data, they created a model capable of estimating each individual's "heart age" and applied rigorous statistical analyses to compare the results.

The results made it clear that The 'diseased' heart exhibits different characteristics than a healthy one. For example, those with comorbidities had a larger stroke volume—that is, the amount of blood ejected by the left ventricle with each beat . In the healthy group, the estimated heart age corresponded almost exactly to the participants' chronological age. However, in unhealthy subjects, the cardiac age calculated from the MRI scan was almost five years older than the actual age , revealing premature aging of the heart muscle.

Some experts see this new tool as a path toward personalized treatment, where each patient's heart receives a plan tailored to their specific needs. Doctors could adjust medications, recommend more frequent checkups, or suggest lifestyle changes based on the heart's response. "It's exciting to see how this MRI technique could change lives," explains Hosamadin Assadi , co-author of the paper.

Understanding heart health by determining its "age" in relation to chronological age has become a topic of interest among cardiologists, researchers, and physicians. This is especially true considering that common factors, such as stress , high-fat meals, and lack of exercise, could be accelerating the aging process. But what about the heart?