Determining how fast a middle-age person can run a mile can help predict the risk of heart attack or stroke decades later for men, and could be an early indicator of cardiovascular disease for women, finds UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers.

 

In a recent study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), researchers analyzed the heart disease risk of 45-, 55- and 65-year-old men based on their fitness level and traditional risk factors, such as age, systolic blood pressure, diabetes, total cholesterol and smoking habits. The scientists found that low levels of midlife fitness are associated with marked differences in the lifetime risk for cardiovascular disease.

A 55-year-old man who needs 15 minutes to run a mile has a 30% lifetime risk of developing heart disease. In contrast, a 55-year-old who can run a mile in eight minutes has a lifetime risk of less than 10%.

“Heart disease tends to cluster at older ages, but if you want to prevent it, our research suggests that the prescription for prevention needs to occur earlier – when a person is in his 40s and 50s,” said Jarett Berry, MD, assistant professor of internal medicine and a corresponding author on the studies.

Researchers found that a higher fitness level lowered the lifetime risk of heart disease even in people with other risk factors.

In a separate study in Circulation, UT Southwestern researchers found that the same treadmill test predicts how likely a person is to die of heart disease or stroke more accurately than assessing the risk using only typical prediction tools such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Researchers collected information from thousands of participants who underwent a comprehensive clinical exam and a treadmill exercise test at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas between 1970 and 2006.

In the JACC study, researchers evaluated more than 11,000 men tested before 1990 – women were excluded because of the low number of participants and cardiovascular death rates – and found 1,106 who died of heart attack or stroke during the study period.

For the Circulation study, researchers examined more than 66,000 participants without cardiovascular disease, ages 20 to 90. They were then followed until death or the end of the study period; follow-up lasted up to 36 years. There were 1,621 cardiovascular deaths during the study. The researchers found that by adding fitness to the traditional risk factors, they significantly improved their ability to classify participants’ short-term (10 years) and long-term (25 years) risk.

For more information on UT Southwestern’s clinical services in heart disease, visit http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/heartlungvascular.

 

[Source: UT Southwestern Medical Center]