The president's “heart age” is reported to be 14 years younger than his chronological age. What does this mean and who can take this test?
ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
President Trump has the heart age of 65 years old. This is 14 years younger than his biological age. That, at least, is the assessment of the president's doctor after a medical examination earlier this month. But what does this really mean? How is cardiac age calculated? NPR's Allison Aubrey gets to the heart of the matter.
ALISON AUBREY, BYLINE: We all know our age by our date of birth. If there are 80 candles on your birthday cake this year, one for each year, your chronological age is 80. But scientists have another way to estimate age, known as biological age, which is the rate at which you age compared to your peers. Cardiologist Doug Vaughn of Northwestern University says heart age is an indicator of the health of your heart.
DOUG VAUGHN: We have better measures of cardiovascular age these days. So, if, say, you're 80 years old and your risk is equal to that of a 67-year-old, then you would say, well, my cardiovascular age is, so to speak, 13 years younger.
AUBREY: One way to estimate the age of the heart is with an electrocardiogram, or ECG, which is a quick and painless test that records the electrical activity of the heart. “If you've ever had one, you may remember electrodes being placed on your chest,” explains Dr. Luke Laffin, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
LUKE LUFFIN: It's a short 10-second electrical shot. It gives us a lot of information about the heart rhythm and can also tell us if someone is having a heart attack or if there are changes in the size of the chambers of the heart.
AUBREY: The results appear on the graph as waves and squiggles. And doctors know how to look at these charts to spot obvious signs of a problem. This is, of course, nothing new. ECG for over a hundred years. But what's new is how the results can be used to estimate cardiac age using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Laffin says that by using data from millions of ECGs, computers can process trillions of bits of information.
LUFFIN: So you get all these ECGs. You put them into this machine learning algorithm for AI. And then he is able to grasp subtle features, patterns that we do not recognize.
AUBREY: Artificial intelligence models were designed to detect patterns that cardiologists could never detect with the naked eye, and by studying millions of them, they identified tiny changes that correlate with disease risk and age.
VAUGHN: So, I'm a cardiologist. I can read an electrocardiogram. I can't tell your age. I have no idea what age you are based on how we learn to read an electrocardiogram. But this tool does what human eyes cannot do.
AUBREY: It's important to know that this is not a hard and fast assessment. Dr. Vaughan says cardiologists have many existing tools, including stress tests, coronary artery calcium scores and many other indicators, that also predict heart disease risk.
VAUGHN: This includes your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, whether you have diabetes, whether you smoke or not.
AUBREY: There's intrigue in the age of artificial intelligence because the idea of heart age is new. And Vaughan says several AI models are now being tested to confirm their accuracy, so it's still early days. But one day it may become routine.
VAUGHN: I think that's where we're headed. You know, the next wave of preventive medicine involves measuring biological age at an earlier stage, perhaps at age 20.
AUBREY: Finding signs of problems early in life creates more opportunities for intervention to prevent heart disease.
Allison Aubrey, NPR News.
© 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of Use And permissions pages in www.npr.org for more information.
The accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript may be modified to correct errors or accommodate audio updates. Audio on npr.org may be edited after it is originally broadcast or published. The authoritative recording of NPR programs is the audio recording.
