Abstract P449: Life’s Essential 8 and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Prospective Study Among Racially and Geographically Diverse Populations

Abstract

Introduction: Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) is a new guideline proposed by American Heart Association to improve cardiovascular health, including four health behaviors (i.e., eat better, be more active, quit tobacco, get healthy sleep) and four health factors (i.e., manage weight, control cholesterol, manage blood sugar, manage blood pressure). Hypothesis: Higher adherence to LE8 is associated with reduced risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) among racially and geographically diverse populations. Methods: The current analysis was based on CHD case-control studies nested within the Southern Community Cohort Study (baseline: 2002-2009), Shanghai Women’s Health Study (1996-2000), and Shanghai Men’s Health Study (2002-2006), including 900 incident CHD cases identified through 2018 and 900 age-/sex-/race-matched controls (300 pairs of White Americans, Black Americans, and Chinese adults, respectively). Within each cohort, we constructed the LE8 score (range: 0 to 100) based on DASH diet quality, moderate/vigorous physical activity, tobacco smoking, sleep hours, body mass index, total and non-HDL cholesterol, diabetes status/blood glucose, and hypertension status/blood pressure. We used conditional logistic regression to evaluate odds ratios (ORs) between the LE8 score and incident CHD, adjusting for sociodemographic factors and family history of CHD. Results: The mean ± standard deviation (SD) of LE8 score was 48.1±13.4 among White women, 48.5±14.4 among White men, 48.1±12.3 among Black women, 50.0±13.6 among Black men, 57.2±12.2 among Chinese women, and 50.7±12.5 among Chinese men. Higher LE8 score was associated with significantly reduced risk of CHD: OR for 1-SD increase was 0.58 (95% CI: 0.51-0.65) among all participants, 0.64 (95% CI: 0.53-0.78) among White Americans, 0.57 (95% CI: 0.46-0.69) among Black Americans, 0.52 (95% CI: 0.42-0.65) among Chinese, 0.49 (95% CI: 0.41-0.60) among women, and 0.65 (95% CI: 0.56-0.75) among men; all P <0.001 ( P interaction >0.05 for race and P interaction =0.01 for sex). Similar patterns of beneficial associations were also found in stratified analyses by age group, education level, and history of diabetes, hypertension, or dyslipidemia, with ORs ranging from 0.46 to 0.74. Conclusions: Higher adherence to LE8 is associated with ~35-50% reduced risk of incident CHD across racially and geographically diverse populations, supporting the importance of promoting healthy lifestyles and maintaining metabolic health.