Healthy Middle Age Makes a Big Difference

Avoiding certain health problems in middle age dramatically improves your lifetime chances of preventing a heart attack or stroke, a new study finds. The study included about 250,000 people. It looked at a person’s lifetime risk based on their health at certain ages. Researchers put together the numbers from 18 prior studies. To gauge health, they focused on the standard factors that most strongly increase the risk of heart attack or stroke. They are smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. The study found that people with none of these risk factors at mid-life had very little chance of a heart attack or stroke in the rest of their lives. An example would be a 45-year-old male nonsmoker with ideal cholesterol and blood pressure, and no diabetes. His chance of ever having a heart attack or stroke would be 1.4%, researchers said.