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AHA Scientific Sessions 2026 Abstract

Age gap linked to death after septal reduction in patients 75+

Each five-year higher gap between age estimated from heart electrical recordings and actual age was associated with a 53% higher relative risk of death.

Paper by Sina Danesh, Hartzell V Schaff, Arman Arghami, +11 more authorsJeffrey B Geske · Mayo Clinic

Our read

Biomarkers
Studied:
Cohort study of 190 older patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy
What changed:
Death from any cause was 53% higher for each 5-year larger gap between ECG-estimated age and actual age
The catch:
Differences in health or surgical risk could still influence results despite matching
Why it’s aging research:
It measures an outcome that worsens with age.

Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News

Paper
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Patients aged 75 or older with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, in which thickened heart muscle hinders blood flow, underwent septal reduction procedures in an observational study. Researchers matched 190 of 281 patients who had surgery or a less invasive alcohol-based procedure to reduce the obstruction. Among matched patients, median age was 78 and 70.5% were women.

Artificial intelligence estimated age from electrocardiograms, recordings of the heart’s electrical activity. The age gap was this estimate minus actual age. A larger gap before the procedure was linked to higher mortality after accounting for age, sex and other health conditions. Among 189 patients with repeated recordings, surgery was associated with larger, more sustained gap reductions than the alcohol-based procedure. The gap progressively declined after surgery but remained relatively unchanged after the alcohol-based procedure.

Why it matters

Biological aging measures may help assess risk when older patients and clinicians weigh surgery against a less invasive heart procedure.

Caveats

Procedure choice was not randomized, so differences in health or surgical risk could still have shaped the results despite matching. The findings concerned patients aged 75 or older at one clinic and were reported in a conference abstract.

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