Life's Essential 8 Heart Health Score Calculator
Score your cardiovascular health with the American Heart Association's Life's Essential 8: eight measures, each scored from 0 to 100, averaged into one score.
1. Diet: tick each statement that describes your usual eating
2. Activity, nicotine and sleep
3. Body and lab results (leave blank any you don't have)
What Life's Essential 8 measures
The American Heart Association's 2022 update scores eight measures of cardiovascular health: diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, sleep, body mass index, blood lipids, blood glucose and blood pressure. Each has a scoring algorithm from 0 to 100 points, and the overall score is the unweighted average of the eight.1 The writing group suggests reading an overall score of 80 to 100 as high cardiovascular health, 50 to 79 as moderate and 0 to 49 as low.1
How each measure is scored
Activity earns full points at 150 or more minutes a week of moderate or vigorous exercise. Nicotine scores 100 for never smoking and 75, 50 or 25 for quitting at least 5 years, 1 to 5 years or under a year ago, with current vaping scored as 25 and current smoking as 0; living with an indoor smoker subtracts 20 points. Sleep earns full points at 7 to under 9 hours a night. BMI earns full points under 25. Non-HDL cholesterol (total minus HDL) earns full points under 130 mg/dL, glucose under 100 mg/dL fasting (or HbA1c under 5.7%) without diabetes, and blood pressure under 120/80; taking medicine for cholesterol or blood pressure subtracts 20 points from that measure, and people with diabetes are scored on their HbA1c.1
The diet screener
For individuals, the score uses the 16-item Mediterranean Eating Pattern for Americans (MEPA) screener, one point per item; 15 or 16 points earn the full 100, and lower scores earn 80, 50, 25 or 0 points.1 The items and their exact thresholds come from the AHA's Supplemental Material (Lloyd-Jones 2022). In its validation study of 70 women, the screener's overall score correlated only modestly with a full food-frequency questionnaire (ρ = 0.365), so treat the diet score as a rough guide.2 One item awards a point for light drinking, carried over from Mediterranean-diet scoring; this calculator does not suggest starting to drink.
Special cases
BMI ranges may differ by ancestry, and the World Health Organization recommends different ranges for people of Asian or Pacific ancestry, which you can choose above; for a BMI under 18.5, the writing group defers to clinician judgment, so this calculator leaves BMI out rather than scoring it.1 When fewer than eight measures are available, the AHA suggests averaging the ones you have, which is what this calculator does when you leave a lab result blank. A fasting glucose of 126 or above without a diabetes diagnosis is not covered by the scoring table, so enter your HbA1c or discuss the result with your clinician.
How we check this calculator
Every time the site is built, an automated test compares our scoring with an independent implementation across 134 cases and checks that it reproduces the AHA's own worked examples: totals of 61 and 88 for the first example patient, 23 for the second and 90 for the third.
This calculator is for education. Life's Essential 8 summarises heart-health habits and measurements; it does not diagnose disease or estimate your personal risk of a heart attack. Discuss your results with your clinician.
References
- 1Lloyd-Jones DM, et al. "Life's Essential 8: Updating and Enhancing the American Heart Association's Construct of Cardiovascular Health: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association." Circulation. 2022;146(5):e18-e43. PubMed · DOI
- 2Cerwinske LA, et al. "Evaluation of a dietary screener: the Mediterranean Eating Pattern for Americans tool." J Hum Nutr Diet. 2017;30(5):596-603. PubMed · DOI