What is it about?
Chronic exposure to environmental stressors like poor diet quality, sedentarism, ambient air pollution and noise, sleep deprivation and psychosocial stress elevate the risk for chronic diseases including heart disease. Adhering to low-risk lifestyle factors has the potential to delay the onset of these diseases, and benefit occurs even when the impact on conventional risk markers is discouragingly minimal or not present. The aims of this review are (a) to discuss novel lifestyle risk factors and their underlying biochemical principles and (b) to provide new perspectives on potentially more feasible recommendations to improve long-term adherence to low-risk lifestyle factors.
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Why is it important?
The global burden of obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome is continuously increasing and may be the largest yet-known non-infectious pandemic, subsequently leading to an enormous increase of atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases like heart disease. To date, lifestyle guidance has failed to substantially impact the burden from the twin epidemics of metabolic disease and ASCVD. Rising healthcare costs highlight the need for new strategies that have the potential to improve long-term adherence.
Perspectives
Cardiovascular disease risk factors such as visceral adiposity, diabetes, hypertension and dyslipidaemia might in part be seen as symptoms and consequences of high-risk lifestyle risk factors such as poor diet quality, sedentary behaviour, exposure to ambient air pollution/noise, sleep deprivation and psychosocial stress. Adhering to low-risk lifestyle factors reduces cardiovascular disease risk in a multifactorial manner, thus significantly adding to the prognostic benefit of conventional risk factor control. This is a powerful public health message for clinicians and patients alike.
Dr. med. Katharina Lechner
Technische Universitat Munchen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Lifestyle factors and high-risk atherosclerosis: Pathways and mechanisms beyond traditional risk factors, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, August 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2047487319869400.
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