Cardiovascular health status among Australian adults

BACKGROUND: The American Heart Association (AHA) committee recently set a guideline to define and monitor the cardiovascular health status. This study aimed to estimate cardiovascular health status among Australian adults using the guideline. METHODS: We used data from a nationally representative sample of 7499 adults (age ≥18 years) from 2011 to 2012 Australian Health Survey. We applied the modified AHA’s definition to estimate the ideal proportions of the seven metrics and the overall cardiovascular health status. RESULTS: Ideal status was most prevalent for fasting plasma glucose (83.6%) and least observed for dietary pattern (4.8%). The estimated percentage of ideal cardiovascular health was 0.15% in Australian adults. An estimated 0.52% of Australian adults had all four ideal cardiovascular health factors, and 16.38% had all four ideal cardiovascular health behaviors. There exist some age and sex variations for the ideal status of individual metric and the overall cardiovascular health. CONCLUSION: The percentage of ideal cardiovascular health in Australian adults is extremely low. Public health policies should be implemented to improve the population-wide cardiovascular health status in Australia.