A new US study suggests that middle aged people born of parents where one or both live to be 85 or more have a lower risk of heart disease.
The study is published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Dr Dellara F. Terry from the University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts and colleagues looked at data on over 1,500 members of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS).
The FHS contains risk factor data on cardiovascular and other chronic diseases covering several generations of residents in Framingham, Massachussets from 1948 to the present day.
All the participants’ parents were members of the FHS and either lived to be 85 or more, or died before 1st of January 2005.
In this longitudinal study Dr Terry and colleagues looked at two batches of data, one from the 1970s and the other from the 1980s, and analyzed how the variables had changed over time.
The first batch of data was taken between 1971 and 1975, when the average age of all 1,697 participants was 40 years, and the second batch was taken between 1983 and 1987 and covered 1,319 of the participants.
Of the participants, 705 of them had no parents who lived to be 85 or more, 804 of them had one and 188 of them had both parents reaching this age or more. These three groups were termed “parental survival categories”.
The data collected at both measuring points included: age, sex, educational level, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, blood cholesterol (total/high-density lipoprotein ratio), smoking behaviour, body mass index (BMI, a combination of height and weight), and Framingham Risk Score (a measure of cardiovascular disease risk).
The researchers calculated the risk factors at batch 1 (1971-1975) for 1,697 participants and then evaluated their progression at batch 2 (1983-1987) for the 1,319 participants who remained in the study.
The results showed that for all the risk factors, except BMI, there was a trend toward lower cardiovascular disease risk with increasing parental survival category at the time the first batch of data was taken.
That is the ones with both parents over 85 had a significantly lower cardiovascular disease risk on all counts (except BMI) compared with those whose parents did not reach their 85th birthday. This pattern was also reflected in the mean Framingham Risk Scores of the three groups.
“The percentage of those individuals with optimal or normal blood pressure, total/high-density lipoprotein [“good”] cholesterol ratio, and low Framingham Risk Score was highest in those with both parents surviving to 85 years or older,” said the research team. “The relations for body mass index were less clear; however, fewer obese individuals had both parents survive,” they added.
Looking at the data longitudinally, that is comparing the results from the first batch in the 1970s and the second batch in the 1980s, Dr Terry and colleagues found that the risk factor advantage was still there for participants with long-lived parents compared to those whose parents had died younger.
The researchers said their study suggests that “individuals with long-lived parents have more advantageous cardiovascular risk profiles in middle age compared with those whose parents died younger and that the risk factor advantage persists over time.”
To explain the findings they propose that “there are well-established genetic contributions to each of the risk factors that we have examined that may partially explain the reduced risk factors for those with long-lived parents.”
Looking at where to go from here, they suggest a better understanding of the genetic variation in risk factors and longevity could help to develop better treatments in the community.
In an editorial accompanying the study, Dr Clyde B. Schechter of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, suggests that because longevity appears to be heriditary, the study of children of the very elderly could give useful insights into the link between living longer and cardiovascular disease.
“Heart disease is the leading cause of death among all ages in the United States,” he writes. “Heart disease accounts for a large enough proportion of all deaths that any factor that promotes exceptional longevity almost inevitably must lead to decreased risk of cardiac death. This is one reason that cardiovascular disease is a major area of longevity research.”
Other experts have pointed out that this study does not suggest if a person’s parents die before the age of 85 it means they can’t change their risk of getting heart disease.
Other studies have shown that lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, sleep and stress also impacts heart disease risk, and people can do something about these.
“Characteristics of Framingham Offspring Participants With Long-lived Parents.”
Dellara F. Terry; Jane C. Evans; Michael J. Pencina; Joanne M. Murabito; Ramachandran S. Vasan; Philip A. Wolf; Margaret Kelly-Hayes; Daniel Levy; Ralph B. D’Agostino Sr; Emelia J. Benjamin.
Arch Intern Med. 2007;167:438-444.
Published online Vol. 167 No. 5, March 12, 2007.
Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today