For decades, cardiovascular medicine has operated under an almost immovable dogma: If you want to protect your heart you have to watch your dietexercise and control blood pressure. However, science has begun to see that there are other social factors that can also be very important, such as the status of personal bank accounts.
The study. In order to reach this conclusion that aims to drastically change an authentic dogma of medicine, the Mayo Clinic has analyzed more than 280,000 patients thanks to the artificial intelligence application. To do this, the AI has analyzed the patients’ conventional medical tests and their history. In this way, researchers have discovered that the factors that accelerate the biological clock the most of the heart is not always in the medical history, but in the bank account and in the shopping basket.
The ‘invisible’ age. The technological core of this discovery is found in an AI algorithm applied to electrocardiograms. In this way, unlike the analysis carried out by a cardiologist who looks for arrhythmias or abnormalities in the conduction of the heart, this learning model analyzes changes in the electrocardiogram that are very subtle in the electrical signals that can go unnoticed by the human eye.
In this way, the algorithm can estimate something that science calls “heart age.” From here, when the researchers compared the figure with the patient’s actual age, a cardiac age gap emerged. That is, there were people with a heart that looked older than it should, which is a much more accurate predictor of mortality than some traditional markers.
The social impact. Now the question that science asks is why. The results of the study published in Mayo Clinic Procedures, place financial stress and food insecurity as the most aggressive social determinants of health (SDH).
In this way, what the study demonstrates is that constant worry about payment, rent, mortgage or the increase in the cost of basic foods generates a state of physiological wear and tear that AI detects as premature aging of cardiovascular tissue.
The reasons. At a biological level, this phenomenon is explained through the chronic stress response. Economic uncertainty keeps the body in a state of permanent “alert”, triggering levels of cortisol and adrenaline. This prolonged hormonal overexposure damages the vascular endothelium and alters heart rate variability, effects that the Mayo Clinic algorithm identifies as signs of an aging heart.
Surprisingly, the study indicates that the impact of this precariousness can equal or even exceed the risk posed by physical inactivity or chronic diseases such as diabetes in terms of accelerated mortality.
From loneliness to inflation. This work is not an isolated event, but the culmination of a line of research that the Mayo Clinic has reinforced in recent years. In 2024, the same team used AI to show that social isolation acts in the opposite way: having strong support networks and community ties works as a biological “brake” that slows down the aging of the heart. However, the new 2025 study is the first to prioritize economic factors over clinical ones.
Change the rules of the game. This finding reminds us of the importance that in clinical practice, beyond seeing results of tests or electrocardiograms, we must also know that in front of the doctor there is a human patient. And not only is the high cholesterol in the analysis important, but there are also many social problems behind him that can interfere with his pathology and that doctors should be aware of.
The relevance of this work lies in its ability to prioritize. While other previous studies already talked about social stress, this is the first to use AI models to quantify exactly how economic precariousness “rusts” the heart muscle compared to traditional medical factors.
Images | Robina Weermeijer Christian Erfurt
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