You may feel young at heart, but with apologies to Frank Sinatra, that’s probably a fairy tale. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the average American man has a heart that’s 7.8 years “older” than his chronological age; for women, the comparable “heart age” is 5.4 years higher than her calendar age.

If the idea of a heart age sounds like a gimmick, that’s because it is. The concept was developed by public health experts who work on the venerable Framingham Heart Study as a way to help regular folks understand their risk of having a heart attack, stroke, chest pain, peripheral artery disease or another heart-related condition, including death.

And it works. A clinical trial in Europe found people who were told their heart age improved their heart health more than people who were told their absolute risk of developing cardiovascular disease. In that trial, those who learned their heart age were able to reduce it by 1.5 years over the course of a year, compared with a reduction of only 0.3 years for those who got the traditional information.

Hearts in the United States need all the help they can get. Nearly 800,000 Americans die of heart-related conditions each year, and their illnesses cost about $320 billion annually, according to the American Heart Association.

So researchers from the CDC’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention decided to estimate the heart age of American adults and see how those ages differed according to where they live, how much education and money they have, and their racial and ethnic backgrounds.

They used data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which includes questions about cardiovascular disease every other year. Participants in the survey report their age, smoking status, body mass index, and whether they have diabetes or take medication to control their blood pressure.