Fretting over making ends meet ages your heart just as much as classic risk factors for heart disease, a new Mayo Clinic study says.

Financial strain and food insecurity are the strongest drivers of accelerated heart aging, researchers reported in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

The heart aging associated with money and food worries is similar to that caused by conventional risk factors like diabetes, high blood pressure and prior heart attack, researchers concluded.

This aging increases people’s risk for heart disease and heart-related death, researchers said.

“Our study highlights the critical role of social determinants of health in cardiac aging and mortality,” senior researcher Dr. Amir Lerman said in a news release. He’s director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

For the study, researchers estimated the heart aging of more than 280,000 people treated by the Mayo Clinic between 2018 and 2023, using an AI-enabled electrocardiogram (ECG) to track the wear-and-tear age of each person’s heart compared to their birth age.

The team compared that data against a questionnaire that assessed the patients’ social determinants of health — factors like stress, exercise, social connection, housing, financial strain, food insecurity, transportation needs, nutrition and education.

These non-medical factors can have a significant impact on a person’s health and risk of death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Our current research was motivated by the observation that traditional risk factors do not explain and contribute equally to cardiovascular disease,” Lerman said. “There are social factors that we do not identify or inquire about from our patients that may potentially reverse biological aging.”

Overall, social determinants of health most influenced a person’s cardiac aging, compared to traditional risk factors, results showed.

And among those social determinants of health, financial strain and food insecurity were the most impactful when it came to accelerated aging of a person’s heart.

Researchers concluded that social factors like financial strain, housing and lack of exercise can be used to predict a person’s risk of heart-related death, matching or surpassing conventional risk factors.

For example, financial strain increased risk of premature death by 60% and housing instability by 18%, compared to 10% for a previous history of heart attack and 27% for smoking, the study said.

“Identifying the most important risk factors for cardiac aging allows for targeted preventive intervention in the community and empowers physicians to engage in patient-centered care, addressing the social context that contributes to heart disease,” Lerman said.