Recently, the annual meeting of European Society of Cardiology (ESC 2023), the top academic congress in cardiovascular field, was officially held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. During ESC 2023, multiple cardiovascular research status and trends, including ESC clinical guidelines, major clinical research results, prevention and treatment strategies and the latest understanding were released. At ESC 2023, Wang Yang, a doctoral student of Professor Mu Jianjun’s team from the First Affiliated Hospital (FAH) of Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU), delivered an oral presentation entitled Early-Life Cardiovascular Risk Factor Trajectories and Vascular Aging in Midlife: A 30-Year Prospective Cohort Study at the special session of Peripheral Vascular and Cerebrovascular Disease. These original research results have also been published in Hypertension, a top-notched journal in the field of hypertension.
Age is one of the most important risk factors of vascular aging, and vascular aging becomes more severe from midlife. Early-life cardiovascular risk factors (CVRFs), such as increased systolic blood pressure (SBP), body mass index (BMI) and heart rate (HR), exert significant effects upon long-term vascular aging. Compared with CVRF assessment at a single time point, continuous monitoring of CVRF from childhood to adulthood can more accurately predict the risk of cardiovascular disease in adults. Based on the Hanzhong Adolescent Hypertension Study, Professor Mu Jianjun's team has found that maintaining CVRFs from childhood, including high SBP, BMI and HR trajectories, is closely correlated with increased risk of vascular aging during midlife. In addition, subjects who have been long-term exposed to more CVRFs have a higher risk of vascular aging. These results suggest that continuous monitoring of CVRFs from childhood may be one of the important methods to identify individuals with high-risk cardiovascular disease in early-life, which is of significance for deeply understanding the relationship between traditional CVRFs and vascular aging, exploring early prevention and control, and reducing long-term cardiovascular risk.
Hypertension has constantly been the key research direction of Department of Cardiology of the FAH of XJTU, which has formed its own advantages and characteristics and exerted profound influence at home and abroad. This study is performed based on the long-term hypertension follow-up cohort established by Hanzhong Adolescent Hypertension Study. The team conducted a long-term follow-up study for nearly 5,000 primary and middle school students, aged 6-18 years, from 26 rural areas in three towns in Hanzhong, Shaanxi province in China. A total of 7 cycles of follow-up were conducted in 1989, 1992, 1995, 2005, 2013, 2017 and 2023, respectively. The follow-up time was up to 36 years. Based on this cohort study, the research team has published a series of high-quality original research results in JASN in 2018, EClinicalMedicine in 2022, Hypertension in 2022 and 2023, respectively.
