Ideal Cardiovascular Health in Former Smokers

Abstract

Former smokers remain at increased risk for cardiovascular diseases compared to never smokers, but have lower risk than current smokers. We therefore hypothesized that former smokers would have an ideal cardiovascular health phenotype that was intermediate between current and never smokers. Differences in ideal cardiovascular health between never (n = 1025), former (n = 428), and current (n = 108) smokers were evaluated in the My Research Legacy study, which collected cardiovascular health data from the Life’s Simple 7 survey and digital health devices. Former smokers had a higher burden of prevalent cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and hypercholesterolemia compared to current and never smokers (all p p p < 0.01). These findings suggest that former smokers are a heterogeneous group and increased attention to cardiovascular health factors and behaviors is warranted to achieve ideal cardiovascular health.

Keywords

• smoking cessation
• phenogroups
• digital health devices
• surveys
• ideal cardiovascular health