Trump’s ‘cardiac age’ is 14 years younger. What does that mean? : NPR

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President Trump has the heart age of a 65-year-old man. That’s 14 years younger than his biological age. At least that’s the opinion of the president’s doctor following a medical evaluation carried out earlier this month. But what does this actually mean? How is heart age calculated? NPR’s Allison Aubrey gets to the heart of the matter.

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: We all know our age based on our birth date. If you have 80 candles on your birthday cake this year, one for each year, your chronological age is 80. But scientists have another way to estimate age, called biological age, which is your rate of aging relative to your peers. Northwestern University cardiologist Doug Vaughan says your heart age is a measure of your heart health.

DOUG VAUGHAN: We have better measures of cardiovascular age today. And so if, let’s say, you’re 80 years old and your risk is that of a 67-year-old, then you would say, well, my cardiovascular age, so to speak, is 13 years younger.

AUBREY: One way to estimate heart age is to use an electrocardiogram, or ECG, which is a quick, painless test that records the electrical activity of the heart. If you’ve ever had one, you may remember that electrodes are placed on your chest, says Dr. Luke Laffin, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic.

LUKE LAFFIN: It’s a short, 10-second electric snapshot. It gives us a lot of information about heart rhythm, but can also tell us if someone is having a heart attack or if there are changes in the size of the heart chambers.

AUBREY: The results are displayed as a series of waves and squiggles on a graph. And doctors know how to examine these charts to spot obvious signs of problems. This is certainly not new. The ECG is over a hundred years old. But what’s new is how the results can be used to estimate heart age using AI and machine learning. Laffin says that using data from millions of EKGs, computers can analyze billions of bits of information.

LAFFIN: So you get all these ECGs. You put them into this machine learning algorithm for AI. And then, it is able to detect subtle characteristics, patterns that would not be recognizable to us.

AUBREY: AI models were developed to detect patterns that cardiologists could never spot with the naked eye, and by studying millions of them, they identified tiny changes that correlated with disease risk and age.

VAUGHAN: So I’m a cardiologist. I can read the EKG. I can’t tell your age. I have no idea how old you are, based on how we learn to read an EKG. But this tool does things that the human eye cannot do.

AUBREY: The important thing to know is that this is not a precise or definitive estimate. Dr. Vaughan says cardiologists have many tools at their disposal, including stress tests and coronary artery calcium scores, as well as many other measures that also predict heart disease risk.

VAUGHAN: That includes your blood pressure, your cholesterol level, whether or not you have diabetes, whether or not you smoke.

AUBREY: In the age of AI, there is intrigue because the idea of ​​a heart age is new. And Vaughan says several AI models are currently being tested to validate their accuracy, so it’s still early days. But one day, maybe it will become routine.

VAUGHAN: I think that’s where we’re headed. You know, the next wave of preventive medicine is measuring biological age at an earlier point in time, you know, maybe around the 20s.

AUBREY: Detecting signs of problems early in life creates more opportunities for intervention to prevent heart disease.

Allison Aubrey, NPR News.

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