If you want your ticker to remain healthy for as long as possible, just be rich.
Significantly easier said than done. While medicine has treated heart disease by treating cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar, a massive new study from the Mayo Clinic suggests that a person’s financial security plays a huge role in heart stress.
Researchers used AI to analyze nearly 300,000 routine electrocardiograms taken between 2018 and 2023. The AI estimates how old your heart actually is, and that number doesn’t always correlate to how many birthdays you’ve had. It’s based on the wear and tear your heart’s electrical system shows. If you have an “older” heart, electrically speaking, you’ve got higher odds of disease and death.
When researchers compared nine social factors, like housing, food access, transportation, stress, and education, financial strain stood out as the strongest driver of accelerated heart aging. It was even stronger than the traditional medical risk factors we all associate with making your heart pop.
Over two years, people reporting financial struggles had a 60 percent higher risk of death, even after adjusting for medical conditions. For comparison, having had a previous heart attack was linked to just a 10 percent increase in mortality in the same analysis. If you’re experiencing housing instability, your risk of death is raised by 18 percent. Food insecurity ranked second only to financial strain in speeding up heart aging.
The AI model was trained on more than 775,000 ECGs and picked up subtle electrical patterns tied to long-term damage. Among medical diagnoses that actually had to do with internal influences of your body, high blood pressure mattered most, followed by diabetes and heart failure. Overall, though, social conditions explained more about heart aging than your diet or medical history.
None of this feels surprising. It’s the kind of finding that even feels expected. Chronic financial stress keeps stress hormones elevated and promotes inflammation. No money puts healthy food out of reach, regular checkups are irregular at best, and it’s much more difficult to consistently get a hold of medications. Housing instability disrupts sleep and daily routines.
Over time, all of this pressure leaves imprints on the heart — and of course, there are racial disparities at play. Black participants showed faster cardiac aging than white participants, even after accounting for medical issues, strongly suggesting that social conditions are driving much of the gap.
If we want people to live longer, happier, healthier lives, yes, diet, exercise, and all that play a role. But we’re just beginning to understand that our leaders are ignoring what could wind up being the largest factors at play, the factors that they don’t want to help us with: we are all broke, and it’s quite literally killing us.
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