A healthy heart prevents adult-onset asthma: study

Maintaining good cardiovascular health (CVH) can help avert incident adult-onset asthma (AOA) regardless of a person’s asthma genetic risks, according to a study.

The American Heart Association (AHA) unveiled the life’s essential 8 (LE8) to promote CVH. According to the guideline of AHA, LE8 score was derived from eight health status concerning diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, sleep health, body mass index, blood lipids, blood glucose, and blood pressure.

The investigators used Cox proportional hazards models to calculate the effect sizes of associations between CVH, asthma genetic risk, and risk of incident AOA in participants selected from the UK Biobank study.

During an average follow-up of 11.6 years, 6,180 incident AOA cases occurred in 249,713 participants. A higher LE8 score contributed to a decrease in the risk of incident AOA, with a significant linear trend (p<0.0001). Each standard deviation-increase in LE8 led to a 17-percent reduction in incident AOA risk (hazard ratio [HR], 0.83, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.81‒0.85).

Participants with moderate (HR, 0.72, 95 percent CI, 0.67‒0.78) and high CVH scores (HR, 0.52, 95 percent CI, 0.47‒0.58) had a lower risk of incident AOA compared with those with low CVH score (p_trend,0.0001).

“No significant multiplicative or additive interaction was found between LE8 score and genetic risks,” the investigators said.

In stratified analysis, CVH showed a consistent association with incident AOA risk across various asthma polygenic risk score (PRS) levels. Participants with low PRS and high CVD exhibited the lowest risk of incident AOA (HR, 0.28, 95 percent CI, 0.23‒0.34) relative to those with high PRS and low CVH.

“Our findings suggest that maintaining optimal CVH should be recommended as a preventive strategy for AOA, regardless of their asthma genetic risks,” the investigators said.