Research

Mixed

Maintaining a high Cardiovascular Health Score (CHS) trajectory over time is associated with a significantly lower risk of incident cardiovascular disease compared to maintaining a low CHS trajectory.

Your long-term heart health is defined by your habits over years, not just a single check-up. Consistently maintaining good blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, weight, activity, diet, and avoiding smoking significantly lowers your risk of heart attack or stroke. Start with one or two changes and keep them up.

GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Relative to the low-stable trajectory, the high-stable II trajectory was associated with a lower subsequent risk of CVD (adjusted hazard ratio, 0.21; 95% CI, 0.16-0.26, after adjusting for age, sex, educational level, income, occupation, alcohol intake, and serum high-sensitivity C-reactive protein concentration at baseline).
Shouling Wu et al. · JAMA Network Open · 2019

Why this rating

Large prospective cohort (n=74,701), rigorous statistical adjustment, but observational design limits causal inference.

Source

Association of Trajectory of Cardiovascular Health Score and Incident Cardiovascular Disease

Shouling Wu et al. · JAMA Network Open · 2019

DOI 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.4758

cohort · n=74701Cited 313×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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