Better Pre‑Pandemic Heart Health Tied to Lower Risk of Severe COVID‑19

Overview

• The peer‑reviewed analysis published Wednesday used pre‑pandemic data from the C4R collaboration to study 29,740 adults and found 681 severe COVID‑19 cases recorded from March 1, 2020 to February 28, 2023.
• Adults with the highest Life’s Essential 8 scores (80–100) were about 46% less likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID‑19 than those with the lowest scores, and each 14‑point score increase was tied to roughly a 20% lower risk.
• The Life’s Essential 8 is the American Heart Association’s composite of diet, physical activity, smoking, sleep, body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar, and the study identified activity, BMI, blood pressure and sleep as the strongest individual contributors to lower risk.
• The association held across age, sex, race and vaccination subgroups, and roughly half of participants were known to have been vaccinated before infection, but authors emphasize the observational design cannot prove cause and may miss health changes that occurred during the pandemic.
• Researchers say the findings point to public‑health relevance for improving population heart health as a way to boost resilience to severe infections, and they call for further studies to test mechanisms and causal links between heart metrics and infectious‑disease outcomes.