Life’s Essential 8 Heart Health Self-Report
This one-page self-report helps adult clients see how their daily habits and health numbers affect heart health. It uses the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8: sleep, diet, physical activity, tobacco, weight, cholesterol, blood sugar, and blood pressure. Many of the same factors also affect brain health.
Clients mark where they fall on a color-coded scale for each factor, from green (“I do this well”) to red (“I’m not doing this yet”). They then list the factors they marked yellow to red and write down one first step. OT professionals can use it to start a health promotion conversation, find which habits a client is ready to work on, and turn that into a client-chosen goal.
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Start Free TrialResource Inspiration
This handout came out of two OT Potential courses. In OT and Heart Disease, Sabina Khan, PhD, OTD, OTR/L, argued that occupational therapy is underused in heart disease prevention. She pointed to Life’s Essential 8 as a framework that fits OT’s focus on daily habits and routines.
In Risk Factors for Cognitive Decline, Ganesh Babulal, PhD, OTD, MSCI, MOT, OTR/L, FAOTA, went through the modifiable risk factors for dementia named by the 2024 Lancet Commission. (Modifiable means they can be changed.) Several of them are also part of Life’s Essential 8: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, smoking, physical inactivity, and obesity. The course also asked how clinicians could bring that dementia research together with Life’s Essential 8. This handout is one answer: a single page that helps clients look at all eight factors and choose where to start.
Supporting Evidence
The 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia estimates that nearly half of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed by addressing 14 modifiable risk factors. Many of those factors overlap with Life’s Essential 8. This is a population-level estimate. It does not predict any one person’s risk. Still, it supports the idea that the habits behind heart health matter for long-term brain health too.
On the behavior-change side, a systematic review done for the US Preventive Services Task Force found that behavioral counseling on diet and physical activity can help adults with cardiovascular risk factors. Counseling on daily habits and routines is work OT professionals already do. The handout gives that conversation a clear structure.
Instructions and Tips
The first four factors (sleep, diet, activity, and tobacco) are rated by the client. The last four ask for actual numbers: BMI, LDL cholesterol, A1C (average blood sugar over the past few months), and blood pressure. Many clients won’t know these numbers offhand. Before the session, ask them to look up recent results in their patient portal. Or let them skip a row and come back to it after their next medical appointment.
When you introduce the handout, treat the client as a partner. Present the factors as things that protect health, not as a list of things the client is doing wrong. Have the client fill it out, then ask whether one factor stands out as something they’d like to work on. If a client faces real barriers, start with those. Examples include living far from a grocery store or not having a safe place to walk. Naming the barrier first takes the blame off the client and gives you something concrete to problem-solve together.
Keep the Action Plan to one small, specific first step. The handout is for educational purposes only. For questions about lab values or medications, send clients back to their medical team.