Your heart’s health may not depend solely on exercise and diet. If you are constantly stressed about getting money and food, your heart is likely to suffer. This is according to a new study involving thousands of adults in the United States.
Did you know your heart can be judged to be older or younger than your official age? Doctors use various metrics to arrive at a person’s cardiac age, which is used to determine heart health.
In the study published in the December 2025 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, medics used artificial intelligence to arrive at the cardiac ages of the 280,323 people surveyed between 2018 and 2023. The people came from different backgrounds, and 50.8 percent of them were female.
The cardiac ages were analysed alongside answers from questionnaires given to the participants. The questionnaires aimed at establishing the social determinants of health (SDOH) of the subjects, who were between 18 and 90 years old. Social determinants include conditions in which individuals are born, work, live, and learn.
“Social determinants can influence health outcomes both directly and indirectly through increasing the risk of unhealthy behaviours, hence increasing the risk factors,” said the 12 researchers from the Mayo Clinic’s Department of Cardiovascular Medicine.
“We found that economic instability had the strongest impact on cardiac ageing and mortality among all SDOH,” they added. “The second most impactful SDOH was food insecurity.”
CNN’s wellness expert, Leana Wen, was asked to elaborate on the findings.
“Two people of the same chronological age and with the same clinical risk profiles could have hearts that ‘aged’ at different rates, depending on how much financial strain they were under. While the study does not prove that financial stress directly causes accelerated heart aging, it strongly suggests that the economic strain can affect not only mental well-being but also cardiovascular health,” Dr Wen said in an article published on Friday on CNN.com.
According research financial constraints ultimately affect a person’s diet choices.
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“Financial stress has some unique features that make it particularly potent. Unlike an acute stressor such as a short-term work deadline or a brief illness, financial strain is often chronic and ongoing. It can involve persistent worries about bills, housing stability, medical expenses, debt or support of family members. Because money affects so many aspects of daily life, financial stress can be difficult to escape. It may disrupt sleep, limit access to healthy food or medical care, and reduce opportunities for exercise or rest. All these factors compound one another and can amplify cardiovascular risk over time,” said Dr Wen.
The study was titled “Interplay of Social Determinants of Health and Traditional Risk Factors in Predicting Cardiac Aging”.
“The findings of the present study may assist healthcare policymakers in planning preventive strategies and emphasise the importance of screening for social determinants to clinicians in their patient-centred decision-making,” the researchers wrote.
Some 86.3 per cent of the people observed were non-Hispanic white, with only 4.3 per cent being African Americans. The researchers cited the lack of ethnic diversity as one of the limitations.
Those studied had obtained outpatient care at the Mayo Clinic Health System and Mayo Clinic sites in Minnesota, Arizona, and Florida over five years. They provided answers to the questionnaire and underwent an electrocardiogram (a test of the heart’s electrical activity) within one year.
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Giving a context to their findings, the researchers explained that financial constraints ultimately affect a person’s diet choices.
“The adverse impact of low income on health may be mediated by poor health behaviour such as consuming less nutritious food, difficulties in access to health care, and less physical activity, which are associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases,” they said.
“Low accessibility to healthy food eventually leads to seeking nutrient-inadequate but calorie-dense alternative options. Consistent with our findings, previous studies have shown that food insecurity was associated with an increased risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and premature mortality,” they stated.
