Research

Mixed

Higher Life's Simple 7 (LS7) scores, reflecting better cardiovascular health across seven modifiable risk factors, are associated with a significantly lower risk of incident stroke in adults.

Focus on optimizing your cardiovascular health using the Life's Simple 7 framework: manage blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose; maintain a healthy BMI; avoid smoking; stay physically active; and eat a healthy diet. You do not need to achieve 'ideal' status in all areas immediately; even small improvements in these seven areas are associated with a significantly lower risk of stroke.

GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
After adjusting for demographics, socioeconomic status, and region of residence, each better health category of the LS7 score was associated with a 25% lower risk of stroke (hazard ratios, 0.75; 95% confidence interval, 0.63–0.90).
Ambar Kulshreshtha et al. · Stroke · 2013

Why this rating

Large, national population-based cohort (REGARDS) with rigorous outcome adjudication, though observational design limits causal inference.

Source

Life’s Simple 7 and Risk of Incident Stroke

Ambar Kulshreshtha et al. · Stroke · 2013

DOI 10.1161/strokeaha.111.000352

cohort · n=22914Cited 268×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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