Associations between healthy lifestyle practices and cardiovascular disease risk among Chinese adults: a nationwide cohort study

This nationwide cohort study highlights that healthy lifestyle practices are significantly associated with reduced CVD risk. Promoting healthy behaviors through public health strategies is crucial to mitigating CVD risk. Key messages What is already known on this topic: Modifiable lifestyle factors are established drivers of CVD, but composite lifestyle scores lacked nationally representative evidence in China's aging population before this study. What does this study add: Unhealthy lifestyles, including factors such as blood pressure, glucose levels, and BMI, significantly increased the risks of CVD and stroke in Chinese adults. Conditions like obesity, hyperglycemia, and poor sleep independently elevated these risks across all subgroups. How this study might affect research, practice, or policy: This study advocates multifactorial lifestyle interventions into public health policies, targeting high-risk populations, and prioritizing research on the scalability of these interventions.