If you’ve been reading the Longevity Journal for a while now, you’re probably familiar with the two types of aging.
(Here’s a quick refresher
First, there is
chronological aging, or the age of your body as measured by the clock. There’s nothing you can do about your chronological age. As days, weeks, months, and years go by, your body grows chronologically older.
Second, there is
biological aging, also called “senescence”, or the deterioration of your internal functions resulting from accumulated cellular damage in your body. Your biological age is largely independent of your chronological age. A healthy 50-year old can have the biological age of a 35-year old, while an unhealthy 35-year old can have the biological age of a 50-year old.
But it turns out there’s a
third age that you need to know about:
arterial age.
This particular type could be considered a “sub-type” of biological aging, because it refers specifically to an accumulation of damage in your body’s cells. But instead of taking into account the body overall, it’s focused entirely on a single internal system: your cardiovascular system.
The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis [
1] conceived of the concept of arterial age in order to give you a clearer idea of just how healthy (or unhealthy) your heart and circulatory system might be.
They’ve even gone so far as to create an “Arterial Age Calculator” [
2] that you can use to plug in your age, health, and lifestyle data to receive a score that determines how old your arteries are.
The primary metric that’s used to determine your arterial age, interestingly enough, is the Coronary Arterial Calcium (CAC) score. The CAC score tells you just how much calcified plaque is present in your arteries. The more plaque, the higher the score, the greater your risk of cardiovascular disease.
Pretty simple, right?
But there are a few other factors that are utilized, too, including:
- Total cholesterol levels
- HDL cholesterol levels
- Age
- Systolic BP
- Smoking habits
- Medication use
I used the calculators to run tests for two individuals: one healthy, the other less so.
We’ll call our first test patient Bob. He’s 50 years old, reasonably in shape, leads an active life, tries to eat clean, and looks after his health as best he can. Still, age is catching up to him, so his CAC score is 5 (a small amount of arterial plaque), his cholesterol is 190 (at the higher end of “normal” range), his HDL cholesterol is 50 (pretty good for men), his systolic BP is 100 mm Hg (in the “normal” range), and he doesn’t smoke or take heart medications.
Plugging all this into the arterial age calculator, Bob is given an arterial age of 52. He also has an estimated 10-year cardiovascular health disorder risk of 4%. Not bad at all, right?
Our second patient, who we’ll call Ted, is also 50, but he’s made less healthy choices in his life. He eats a bit more junk food, doesn’t really exercise, and occasionally smokes. This has led to the onset of heart conditions, including a higher CAC of 25, a borderline high total cholesterol level of 230, a lower-than-ideal HDL cholesterol level of 30, and a higher risk of prehypertension at a systolic BP of 135. He’s also been taking some medications to combat heart problems.
Plugging all of this data into the arterial age calculator, Ted is given an arterial age of 63 years old. His risk of developing a cardiovascular health disorder is 30%.
See how it works? All of these factors combine to determine not only your arterial age, but also how high your risk of developing cardiovascular health conditions is within the next decade.
It goes to show you just how important it is to take care of your cardiovascular and arterial health while you’re still young so you can remain healthy and age gracefully!