Mitigating five risks can lengthen life

What if the choices you made around your 50th birthday could help you gain an extra decade of healthy life? A landmark global study suggests this isn’t hyperbole, but a quantifiable outcome linked to five common, modifiable health risks. Marshalling data from over two million individuals across 39 countries, researchers have drawn a stark line between those who manage these risks and those who don’t, revealing a potential ‘longevity dividend’ of more than 10 years.

The villains in this health narrative are familiar - high blood pressure, high cholesterol - specifically non-HDL, diabetes, smoking and being underweight, overweight or obese. The Global Cardiovascular Risk Consortium (GCVRC) focused on the cumulative impact of these factors assessed at age 50.

The results are compelling. Consider a woman aged 50 with none of these five risk factors. Compared to one burdened by all five, she can expect, on average, an additional 13.30 years free from cardiovascular disease (CVD) – think heart attack, stroke or coronary procedures. Her overall life expectancy also gets a significant boost - an estimated 14.50 extra years.

For men, the figures are similarly striking, though slightly lower - 10.60 additional CVD-free years and 11.80 more years of life overall. This isn’t merely about postponing the inevitable, it’s about living more years in good health.

While dodging all five risks yields the maximum benefit, the study delved deeper. What if some factors are present? The absence of diabetes or smoking at age 50 individually accounted for the largest single gains in life expectancy (roughly 4-6 years each, depending on the specific outcome measured and gender).

Perhaps more pertinent for many is the power of change. The researchers analysed ‘risk trajectories’ i.e. what happens when people modify their risk factors in mid-life? The findings offer potent encouragement. For individuals who had hypertension between ages 50 and 55 but managed to control it (bring blood pressure below the threshold) between 55 and 60, this change was associated with the greatest gain in CVD-free life years compared to those whose hypertension persisted. However, for adding the most years to overall lifespan, the single most impactful mid-life modification was quitting smoking during that same age window.

Of course, the picture has nuances. Even those free of these five classic risks still face a baseline lifetime CVD risk (estimated at 13 per cent for women, 21 per cent for men), highlighting the role of genetics and other lifestyle factors. The study also observed significant regional variations in the impact of factors such as hypertension, suggesting that local conditions and healthcare access matter. And importantly, these are observational findings - while showing powerful associations, they don’t definitively prove causation in the way a randomised trial might. Unmeasured factors, from diet to exercise habits, could also influence outcomes.

Despite these caveats, the study’s scale and global reach deliver a robust message. Cardiovascular diseases remain the world’s leading cause of death, exacting enormous social and economic tolls. This research reinforces that a substantial slice of this burden is tied to manageable factors. Investing in prevention and actively modifying risks, particularly during the critical mid-life decades, isn’t just sound health advice – the data suggests it could be the key to unlocking an extra decade of healthy living.