American Heart Association's life simple 7 and the risk of atrial fibrillation in the PREDIMED study cohort

Background and aims: The American Heart Association proposed 7 ideal cardiovascular health metrics (Life's Simple 7 [LS7]) namely, not smoking, body mass index <25 kg/m2, healthy diet, moderate physical activity & GE;150 min/week, total blood cholesterol <200 mg/dL, blood pressure <120/80 mmHg and fasting blood glucose <100 mg/dL. Our objective was to assess the association between these LS7 metrics and the incidence of atrial fibrillation (AF).Methods and results: A total of 6,479 participants of the PREDIMED study were included. We calculated the participants' baseline LS7 index ranging 0-7 points to categorize them according to their adherence to these LS7 health metrics. Multivariable Cox regression models were used to estimate Hazard Ratios (HR) and their 95% Confidence Intervals (95% CI). After a median followup of 4.8 years, we identified 250 incident cases of AF. After adjusting for potential confounders, adherence to LS7 index was not associated with the incidence of AF (adjusted HR 0.90 [95% CI: health metric individually associated with a lower risk of AF (HR 0.36 [95% CI: 0.16-0.78]).Conclusions: In a high cardiovascular risk Spanish population, adherence to American Heart As-sociation's LS7 metrics was not associated with the risk of incident AF. Clinical Trials number: ISRCTN35739639.& COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Italian Diabetes Society, the Italian Society for the Study of Atherosclerosis, the Italian Society of Human Nutrition and the Department of Clinical Medicine and Surgery, Federico II University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study aimed to assess the association between adherence to the 7 ideal cardiovascular health metrics proposed by the American Heart Association and the incidence of atrial fibrillation (AF). The results showed that adherence to these metrics was not associated with AF incidence.