Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors May Prevent 80 Percent of Heart Attacks

Middle-aged and older men were much less likely to have heart attacks over an average of 11 years if they drank moderately, didn’t smoke and did everything right on the diet, exercise and weight fronts, the study found.

 Only about 1 percent of men involved in the study fit into this ultra-healthy-living category. But they were 86 percent less likely to have heart attacks than those who ate poorly, were overweight, exercised too little, smoked and drank too much alcohol, the researchers said.

The healthiest men could still eventually die of a heart attack, of course, and the study didn’t say if they live longer than others.

Still, “there is a lot to gain and money to be saved if people had a healthier lifestyle,” said study lead author Agneta Akesson, an associate professor with the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden.

Akesson’s team wanted to gain insight into the combined effect of different aspects of healthy living. Few studies have examined the overall impact in this manner, Akesson said.

For the study, published Sept. 22 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the researchers examined medical records and surveys of more than 20,700 Swedish men who were 45 to 79 years old in 1997. At the time, they had no history of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol. The researchers tracked them until 2009 to see how they fared.

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