Life’s Essential 8: Updating and Enhancing the American Heart Association’s Construct of Cardiovascular Health: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association

🤖 Plain-English Summary

In 2010, the American Heart Association defined a novel construct of cardiovascular health to promote a paradigm shift from a focus solely on disease treatment to one inclusive of positive health promotion and preservation across the life course in populations and individuals. Each metric has a new scoring algorithm ranging from 0 to 100 points, allowing generation of a new composite cardiovascular health score (the unweighted average of all components) that also varies from 0 to 100 points.

🔑 Key Findings

• Extensive subsequent evidence has provided insights into strengths and limitations of the original approach to defining and quantifying cardiovascular health.
• In response, the American Heart Association convened a writing group to recommend enhancements and updates.
• The definition and quantification of each of the original metrics (Life's Simple 7) were evaluated for responsiveness to interindividual variation and intraindividual change.

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