That almost four in five adults in England have a “heart age” older than their actual age is both a truly shocking statistic and at the same time barely surprising.



It is alarming from a health point of view, because “heart age” is a very good marker of overall health and risk of death. In simple terms, it means that 78% of the population in England are at greater risk than they should be of an early death, given their age. Many of the fatalities that will inevitably ensue will be caused by a heart attack or stroke, which together comprise cardiovascular disease (CVD) – Britain’s biggest killer.

In the UK, saving tens of thousands of lives a year by reducing premature or avoidable death is a declared government and NHS priority. These alarming new figures, from Public Health England (PHE), raise serious questions about whether the strategies in place to achieve that goal are working, or if tougher, more interventionist, action– especially to combat the catastrophic advance of obesity– is now needed.

The findings come from a PHE analysis of the results of more than 1.9 million people who have already taken its new online “heart age test”. A third (34%) of respondents had a heart age more than five years older than their actual age. And for one in seven (14%), their heart was at least 10 years older.

How did we end up with so many people at greater risk of what Prof Jamie Waterall, PHE’s national lead for CVD, summarises as “the risk of an early grave or ending up very disabled in later life”?

The dramatic fall in the number of smokers to the stage where, at the last count, 15.1% of adult Britons still light up is the great success story of public health policy over the last 20 years. It was achieved through robust, even aggressive “denormalisation” of cigarette smoking, through advertising bans, plain packaging, the indoor smoking ban and many other measures.

But smoking can take many decades to affect someone’s health, so the NHS is today still dealing with the medical consequences, such as cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and heart problems, from a time when a majority of both sexes smoked.

Obesity is another key factor. Britain is, infamously, “the fat man of Europe”, as the OECD confirmed last November. In England, 66.8% of men are overweight or obese, as are 57.8% of women, PHE research shows.



It is a similarly worrying picture in terms of physical activity, another modern curse and one which some doctors say is as dangerous as smoking. The British Heart Foundation found last year that more than 20 million Britons are physically inactive, which heightens the risk of heart disease and costs the NHS an estimated £1.2bn a year. By inactive, that means that those 20 million do not do even the 150 minutes a week of moderately intense exercise that the government recommends. Six years on, the pledge of the 2012 Olympics, to “inspire a generation” to be fit and active, has not been delivered and, with sedentary lifestyles more and more common, that looks highly unlikely to change.

Then there is high blood pressure, which is the most common trigger of a heart attack or stroke, and itself an alarming byproduct of unhealthy behaviours such as smoking, poor diet and inactivity. A quarter of adults in England have been diagnosed with worryingly high blood pressure, and another 5.6 million are thought to have it. The numbers with high cholesterol are just as stark.

Given all this, the 78% statistic makes sense. PHE hopes the results people get when they take the heart age test will spur them to quit smoking, eat more healthily and take more exercise. However, that so many of us already shun these well-known ways to better health may mean that the revolution in people’s lifestyles which health experts want to see may not occur any time soon.