What’s your heart attack risk? Five warning signs in childhood give clue, study

Researchers have identified five childhood risk factors that are linked to increased risk of heart attacks and stroke in adulthood.

The factors are body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides (a type of fat found in the blood) and youth smoking, according to the study by the International Childhood Cardiovascular Consortium and researchers from the Murdoch Children Research Institute.

The study found that the five factors, especially if occurring in combination, in early childhood could lead to higher risk of cardiovascular issues from as early as age 40.

“Despite the effect medical and surgical care has had on treating heart disease, the major impact will depend on effective preventive strategies,” senior study author and professor at Murdoch Children Research Institute Terrence Dwyer said, according to a news release. “This study confirms that prevention should begin in childhood.”

In the study, researchers followed nearly 40,000 participants ages 3 to 19 from Australia, Finland and the U.S. for a period of 35 to 50 years, according to the release.

These five risk factors, whether found individually or in combination in the children, were good indicators of fatal or non-fatal cardiovascular events in adulthood, the study says.

Dwyer said that in long-term studies such as this one, researchers have often lacked good data on childhood study subjects and failed to follow up with them later in life, when cardiovascular issues become common.

“Studying early life influences on disease has always been put in the ‘too hard’ basket. But researchers in (International Childhood Cardiovascular Consortium) took up this challenge because we knew the potential benefits to human health at the end could be very substantial,” he said, according to the news release.

The study’s findings show that cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke, were seen in over half of the children, and some had nine times higher risk of heart attack and stroke than those who had below-average risk factors as children.

One important finding of the study is that children didn’t need to have high levels of these risk factors in order to have an increased likelihood for heart attack and stroke later in life, Dr. Jessica Woo, a professor at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and one of the lead authors on the study, told McClatchy News Service.

“The kids in the two to three to fourfold increased risk (category) actually are within what you would consider normal childhood levels of these risk factors,” she said. “We’re not taking about kids that have hypertension. We’re not taking about kids that have obesity. So that was really striking to us. Even with these sort of mildly-elevated risk factors, we saw that kids were nonetheless at higher risk.”

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and kills about 659,000 people each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some of the best things you can do to prevent heart disease include quitting smoking, exercising at least 30 minutes to an hour per day and eating a healthy diet, according to the Mayo Clinic.

For adults who had some of these risk factors as children, their fate isn’t necessarily sealed, Woo said.

Quitting smoking, eating healthier and getting more exercise is beneficial at any age, she said.

While making efforts to improve your cardiovascular health as an adult, which can also include taking medication, can help prevent heart attack and stroke, much more can be done to intervene in the lives of children and adolescents to help them later in life, Dwyer said, according to the Murdoch Institute.

“This new evidence justified a greater emphasis on programs to prevent the development of these risk factors in children,” he said, according to the news release. “Clinicians and public health professionals should now start to focus on how this might best be achieved.”

This story was originally published April 7, 2022 at 5:36 PM with the headline "What’s your heart attack risk? Five warning signs in childhood give clue, study."