WASHINGTON, June 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese and American researchers have identified seven key measures of heart health that can help predict future risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

The study, published in the latest journal JAMA Network Open, reported those indicators including four behaviors that people could have control over and three biometrics that should be kept at healthy levels.

The behaviors include no smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, eating healthy and staying physically active, and the biometrics are blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar, according to the study.

Researchers from China's Kailuan General Hospital, the Pennsylvania State University and Harvard University found that people who consistently scored well in the seven metrics had a lower chance of CVD than people who did not.

They designed a scoring system with 0 for poor, 1 for intermediate and 2 for ideal and collected data from 74,701 Chinese adults. Then they evaluated the scoring data with five distinct patterns: maintaining high, medium or low scoring, as well as increasing and decreasing scoring over time.

They found that different living patterns are associated with different risks for developing CVD in the future.

About 19 percent of participants who maintained a better scoring over the four years had a 79-percent lower chance of developing heart disease than people who maintained a low cardiovascular health score, according to the study.

Also, they found that the improvement of overall cardiovascular health over time was also related to lower chance of future CVD in this population, even for those with poor scoring at the beginning of the study.