- A new study examined how smaller lifestyle changes impact cardiovascular health.
- The research team followed more than 50,000 people for around 8 years and tracked habits such as sleep, nutrition, and exercise.
- At the end of the study, the researchers learned that even modest lifestyle habit changes across multiple areas were beneficial to heart health.
- The findings suggest that focusing on multiple, manageable lifestyle changes may be more effective and sustainable than trying to make a large change in a single area.
Since heart disease is often affected by modifiable lifestyle factors, such as diet and exercise, these factors are often among the first things healthcare providers target when heart health issues arise.
Since large lifestyle changes can be difficult to maintain, the researchers wanted to find out whether smaller, combined changes could still improve heart disease risk.
Some modifiable factors include sleep, physical activity, and diet, which the researchers refer to as SPAN in their study.
While medications can help manage blood pressure and cholesterol, changing lifestyle habits is a key part of improving heart health.
Making a sweeping change in eating habits or physical activity can be daunting, though. For example, going from little activity to daily intense exercise can feel overwhelming and hard to sustain.
With this in mind, the researchers in the new study examined whether making smaller changes across each SPAN category can reduce the risk of a major cardiovascular event (MACE), including heart attack, stroke, and heart failure.
The participants had a median age of 63. The large participant pool, which totaled a bit over 53,000 people, was made up of around 57% males and 43% females.
The participants wore devices to track sleep and physical activity. They also completed diet questionnaires, which the scientists used to assign a food score.
Next, they analyzed how combinations of these three behaviors were linked to cardiovascular risk.
Researchers developed a lifestyle score based on SPAN, ranging from 0 to 100. Higher scores indicated healthier habits.
They found that as scores increased, MACE risk steadily declined. For example, people with average SPAN scores had about a 41% lower MACE risk, while those with the highest scores saw up to a 50% reduction in cardiovascular events.
The researchers also looked at the individual SPAN behaviors compared to MACE risk to see which combination of SPAN behaviors reduced risk more than others.
The best combination included sleeping for about 8 to 9.5 hours per night, getting in roughly 40 to 105 minutes of
The scientists also saw that making modest changes is beneficial, too. They found that getting about 10 extra minutes of sleep, doing 5 minutes of physical activity, and improving diet quality slightly — such as adding in a quarter cup of vegetables — is associated with a 10% lower MACE risk.
Overall, the study shows that improving SPAN habits together may not only be more effective than focusing on just one at a time, but even small changes across all areas can add up.
Christopher Berg, MD, a board-certified cardiologist at MemorialCare Heart and Vascular Institute at Orange Coast Medical Center, spoke with Medical News Today about the study.
Berg, who was not involved in this research, said the findings reinforce what many clinicians already expect, but also offer something valuable in showing evidence of how small changes add up.
“What stands out in this study is that very modest lifestyle modifications over several domains can significantly reduce risk,” Berg told us.
While a 10% risk reduction may seem modest for an individual, Berg emphasized its broader impact and said that on a population level, the benefit is “substantial.”
He also pointed out the importance of remembering that the study is observational.
“The patients were not randomized to study the effect of an intervention, but rather to describe relationships and associations between variables and outcomes,” the cardiologist noted.
“Therefore, we can’t say for certain that making these lifestyle modifications would result in less risk of MACE, but we do see an association of less MACE with better lifestyle habits,” explained Berg.
Krishna Bhagwat, MS, an Australian-based cardiothoracic surgeon verified by Doctify, also spoke with MNT about the study findings.
“The findings are not especially surprising, as they reflect what we already know: small healthy habits can add up over time,” said Bhagwat, who likewise was not involved in the research.
“What is interesting is that even modest changes, when combined, may make a meaningful difference. It reinforces that you do not need a perfect lifestyle to see benefits.”
– Krishna Bhagwat, MS
Bhagwat also emphasized the significance of a 10% risk reduction at the population level.
“For an individual, it may sound modest, but across large groups it could translate into fewer cardiovascular events overall,” pointed out Bhagwat. “Importantly, these benefits are associated with relatively small lifestyle changes.”
He also touched on the importance of making even small changes, emphasizing that “the key message is that small, sustainable changes matter.”
“People do not need to overhaul their lifestyle overnight […] starting with simple, realistic steps can still have important health benefits over time,” Bhagwat advised.
