Tag Archive for: Life’s Simple 7

Keeping Track of Life’s Simple 7

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To complete American Heart Month, here’s an easy way to track your heart health called Life’s Simple 7 (LS7), developed by the American Heart Association. LS7 has been around since 2010 but it escaped my attention until recently. For those of you who like to track your progress to see how you’re doing, this is a great tool; you may remember I mentioned it last month, but I think you need the details to really understand how LS7 can work for you.

There are seven different categories of variables to track, hence the name Life’s Simple . . .

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Optimism and Heart Health: The Results

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Tuesday I told you about a study on optimism and cardiovascular health and gave you the details of how the study was done. Today let’s look at the results.

The researchers compared over 5,000 subjects’ level of optimism to their scores on the Life’s Simple 7 assessment of heart health. The subjects were divided into quartiles of optimism, from most to least. When researchers compared the top quartile (highest level of optimism) to the bottom quartile (lowest level of optimism), the optimists were 51% more likely to have an intermediate rank of heart health and 92% more . . .

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Optimism and Heart Health

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Every day, I check the health headlines to see the latest research in medicine, nutrition, and fitness. Recently an intriguing headline said “Optimistic People Have Healthier Hearts”; I’ve seen that type of statement before and it makes sense. The problem is that pencil and paper tests on mental health and attitude and the occurrence of heart disease are not metrics based on hard numbers like blood pressure, but I think this study did it right.

In 2000, researchers began the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) of over 6,000 subjects aged 52–84. Data were collected for 11 . . .

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