On March 6, 2023, Professor Mu Jianjun’s team from the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi 'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) published the latest original research results entitled "Early life cardiovascular risk factor trajectories and vascular aging in midlife: a 30-year prospective cohort study" in Hypertension. Doctoral student Wang Yang is the first author and Professor Mu Jianjun is the corresponding author of this article.

Based on "Hanzhong Adolescent Hypertension Cohort Study", this study was designed to explore the trajectories of cardiovascular risk factors (SBP, BMI and HR) over a 30-year span since 1987 by group-based trajectory modeling, which represented the changes of cardiovascular risk factors in China over the past 30 years of reform and opening up. Persistently increase SBP, high-increasing BMI and high-stable HR trajectories from childhood were intimately correlated with the increased risk of vascular aging in midlife. In addition, according to the trajectory of CVRF, long-term exposure to more CVRF has a higher risk of vascular aging during midlife. These findings suggest that persistent monitoring of CVRF from childhood may be one of the important approaches to identify individuals with a high risk of cardiovascular diseases during early stage, which is of significance for in-depth understanding the association between traditional cardiovascular risk factors and vascular aging, exploring early prevention and control measures, and lowering long-term risk of cardiovascular disease.

Figure 1 SBP, BMI and HR trajectories from childhood to adulthood

The study design, basic experiment and statistical analysis were all jointly completed by the team of Professor Mu Jianjun and the team of Lu Yao, an invited researcher from the Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University. They also received the guidance and assistance from Professor Christian Delles from University of Glasgow in the UK and Assistant Professor John Chang from Yale University in the US. This study was supported by the Key Project of Clinical Research Center of our hospital (XJTU1AF-CRF-2019-004, XJTU1AF-CRF-2022-002). Besides, this study was also financially supported by the Key Project of Ministry of Science and Technology, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi Province, Outstanding Youth Project of Hunan Province, Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province and the funding projects of our hospital.

Figure 2 A group photo of Professor Mu Jianjun's team

Full-text link: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.122.20518