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Triple heart threat cuts decade off lifespan: study 

Middle-aged male smokers with high cholesterol and blood pressure die, on average, a decade sooner than peers without any of these heart disease risk factors, according to a study published Friday.

Many studies have shown that not smoking, eating healthily and exercising cut heart disease rates.

But few have tackled the problem from the other end: to what extend is life expectancy shortened by having these heart disease risk factors?

To find out, researchers led by Robert Clark from the University of Oxford sifted through data from 19,000 male British civil servants who were examined in the late 1960s . . .

In the United States, for example, uncontrolled hypertension has fallen since 1999 by only 16 percent, high blood cholesterol by 19 percent, and tobacco use by just over 15 percent, says the American Heart Association.

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