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According to a new research, having lots of deep forehead wrinkles more than normal may be a sign of cardiovascular disease CVD. Assessing brow wrinkles could be an easy, low-cost way to identify people at risk of CVD. The study author, Yolande Esquirol, associate professor of occupational health at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Toulouse in France explored forehead wrinkles as a marker because it’s so simple and visual.
Active lifestyle and healthy diet can reduce the risk, classical risk factors like blood pressure; lipid and blood glucose levels can also indicate CVD. Risk of heart disease increases as people age, but lifestyle and medical interventions can mitigate the danger if detected early. A link has been detected between male-pattern baldness, earlobe creases, xanthelasma (pockets of cholesterol under the skin) and a higher risk of heart disease, but not with an increased risk of dying.
Researchers examined different visible marker of age-horizontal forehead wrinkles to see if they had any value in assessing cardiovascular risk in a group of 3,200 working adults. Participants, who were all healthy and were in the range of 32 to 62 at the beginning of the study were examined by physicians who assigned scores depending on the number and depth of wrinkles on their foreheads. A score of zero meant no wrinkles while a score of three meant numerous deep wrinkles.
The study participants were followed for 20 years, during which time 233 died of various causes. Of these, 15.2% had score two and three wrinkles. 6.6% had score one wrinkles and 2.1% had no wrinkles. People with wrinkle score of one had a slightly higher risk of dying of cardiovascular disease than people with no wrinkles.
Those who had wrinkle scores of two and three had almost 10 times the risk of dying compared with people who had wrinkle scores of zero, after adjustments for age, gender, education, smoking status, blood pressure, heart rate, diabetes and lipid levels. The higher the wrinkle score, the more the cardiovascular mortality risk increases.
Furrows in the brow are not a better method of evaluating cardiovascular risk than existing methods, such as blood pressure and lipid profiles, but they could be early signals. Changes in collagen protein and oxidative stress seem to play a part both in atherosclerosis and wrinkles. Also, blood vessels in the forehead are so small they may be more sensitive to plaque build-up meaning wrinkles could be one of the early signs of vessel ageing.