American Heart Association adds sleep to cardiovascular health checklist

Image: AHA Life’s Essential 8™ © American Heart Association 2022. American Heart Association news release – June 29, 2022.

Advisory Highlights:

• American Heart Association’s checklist to measure cardiovascular health is updated, now called Life’s Essential 8™, adding healthy sleep as essential for optimal cardiovascular health.
• Other health and lifestyle factors in the checklist, which were part of the previous, 7-item scoring tool, are nicotine exposure, physical activity, diet, weight, blood glucose, cholesterol and blood pressure.
• The new sleep metric suggests 7-9 hours of sleep daily for optimal cardiovascular health for adults, and more for children depending on age.
• The updated scoring can now be used for people ages 2 and older, and four components are measured in new ways: a new guide to assess diet; nicotine exposure replaces cigarette smoking to include electronic cigarettes (vaping) and exposure to secondhand smoke; non-HDL cholesterol is suggested instead of total cholesterol; and the blood sugar measure is expanded to include hemoglobin A1c levels.
• Life’s Essential 8™ is assessed by the online My Life Check tool, which has an updated scoring system to give users a score of up to 100 points based on an average of scores for each health and lifestyle factor. […]

Click here to view original web page at newsroom.heart.org