Diastolic Age: A Cardiac Biological Clock Derived from Echocardiography and the PREVENT Heart Failure Risk Score

BackgroundAmong cardiac measures, diastolic parameters demonstrate the earliest and most consistent age-related changes. This can be leveraged to develop a continuous left ventricular (LV) Diastolic Age from routine echocardiographic parameters. Analogous to how epigenetic clocks weight molecular markers against mortality risk, we calibrated Diastolic Age by weighting echocardiographic features against the validated PREVENT-Heart Failure (HF) risk score. MethodsWe analyzed 1,952 participants from the Project Baseline Health Study (median age 50 [36-64] years, 54% female). The measure was derived using partial least-squares regression anchored on PREVENT-HF and calibrated within a healthy reference subgroup. External validation was performed in the WASE (n=1,708) and Stanford Cardiovascular Aging (n=313) cohorts. Associations with ASE-defined LV diastolic dysfunction (LVDD), epigenetic clocks, and major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) were examined. ResultsDiastolic Age correlated strongly with chronological age (r=0.78) with robust external validation (WASE r=0.76; Stanford r=0.82; calibration slopes {approx}1.0). It increased progressively across grades of diastolic dysfunction and discriminated LVDD with an AUC of 0.89 (95% CI 0.87-0.92), and was independently associated with hypertension, diabetes, and elevated C-reactive protein. While correlated with the Levine (r=0.76) and Horvath (r=0.41) epigenetic clocks, residual analyses indicated that Diastolic Age captures a distinct cardiac-specific dimension of biological aging. Over median follow-up of 4.2 years, it independently predicted MACE (HR 2.30, 95% CI 1.70-3.18), with accelerated diastolic aging across all age groups among those with events. Discrimination was comparable to ASE-defined LVDD (C-index 0.83 vs. 0.82). ConclusionsDiastolic Age provides a continuous, echocardiography-derived measure of cardiac biological aging that complements categorical diastolic grading and epigenetic aging clocks, and independently predicts cardiovascular outcomes.