BACKGROUND

Patients with prediabetes are at increased risk of developing cardiovascular disease. The Life's Essential 8 (LE8) score, updated by the American Heart Association in 2022, is a tool used to quantify cardiovascular health (CVH). Quantifying healthy living status on the basis of the uniform standard LE8 will be useful for confirming whether health interventions can reduce the risk of death in prediabetic patients.

AIM

To investigate the associations between all-cause mortality risk and CVH status (as quantified by the LE8 score) in prediabetic patients.

METHODS

This study included 5344 participants with prediabetes (age: 52.9 ± 15.8 years; 51.6% men). The LE8 score includes four health indicators and four health behaviors. Cox proportional hazard ratios were calculated for all-cause mortality in the high CVH (LE8 ≥ 80), low CVH (LE8 ≤ 50), and moderate CVH (LE8 50-79) subgroups, and restricted cubic spline analyses were performed. Separate analyses of the associations of all-cause mortality risk with each LE8 component and CVH health behaviors and indicators were also performed.

RESULTS

In the median follow-up period of 8.33 years, 658 deaths occurred. Compared with those among participants with high CVH, the covariate-adjusted HRs (95% confidence intervals) for mortality among participants with moderate and low CVH were 2.55 (1.23-5.31) and 3.92 (1.70-9.02), respectively. There was a linear relationship between an improvement in CVH status and a reduction in all-cause mortality risk (-overall < 0.0001, -nonlinear = 0.7989). Improved CVH health behaviors had a more significant protective effect on patients with prediabetes than did the improvement in CVH health indicators.

CONCLUSION

High CVH status (as quantified by the LE8 score) is significantly associated with reduced mortality risk in prediabetic adults in the United States.