Though there are other ways of looking at your risk for having a heart attack or stroke, heart age is an easy way for us to talk about it. You want a heart age that is the same or younger than your actual age. Using information from the Framingham Heart Study and data collected from every US state, CDC projections show that around 69 million US adults that haven’t had a heart attack or stroke, have a heart age that is 5 or more years older than their actual age. That’s about the number of people living in the 130 largest US cities combined. One in 2 men and 2 in 5 women have heart ages 5 or more years older than their actual age, with the average being 7 years older.

What you can do:

• Learn your heart age and how to improve it.
• Start by choosing a risk factor or two that you’re ready to change, like smoking or high blood pressure, and focus on improving them first.
• Work with your doctor to make heart healthy choices for a lower heart age.
• Take action at any age to lower your heart age and keep it low over time.

Check out the entire article here and learn your heart age here. (*Note: Please excuse the slowness, the website is trying to calculate many peoples’ heart age and the link is loading slowly. Please keep trying.)