The effect of the lone parent household on cardiovascular health (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2015–2016)

Single parenthood is associated with adverse health outcomes. How cardiovascular risk differs by parenthood status has had limited study. We hypothesized that single parents would have worse cardiovascular risk profiles compared to those in partnered-parent households. We compared associations of parenthood status and the American Heart Association's Life Simple 7 (LS7), an established metric measuring modifiable components of cardiovascular health (smoking status, body mass index, physical activity, diet, cholesterol, glycohemoglobin, and blood pressure) in multivariable-adjusted models. We selected adults (age ≥ 25) from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2015–16 cycle. We defined single parenthood as reporting a child <18 years residing in the home and marital status other than married or living with partner. LS7, continuous (range 0–14) and categorized as poor (0–4), intermediate (5–9), or ideal (10–14). In total, 2180 NHANES participants identified as parents and 1782 (82%) had complete LS7 scores. Of these, 462 identified as single parents, of whom 356 (74.9%) were women. Single parents were more likely to smoke, have poor physical activity, and have high blood pressure ( p < 0.01) than partnered parents. Single parents had 1.3-fold greater likelihood of poor cardiovascular health compared with partnered parents, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, health insurance, healthcare access, poverty index, educational attainment and number of children (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.01–1.71). We identified an association between single parenthood and adverse cardiovascular health. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering household composition in risk assessment and cardiovascular disease prevention.