Many people use a smartwatch to monitor their cardiovascular health, often by counting the number of measures they take during their day or by recording their average daily heart rate. From now on, researchers offer an improved metric, which combines both using basic mathematics: divide your average daily heart rate by your average daily number of steps.
The resulting report – the daily heart rate in step, or DHRPS – gives an overview of the heart efficiency, According to a study Led by researchers from the Feinberg School of Medicine of the Northwestern University and published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The study revealed that people whose hearts work less effectively, by this metric, were more prone to various diseases, including type II diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, vascular accidents, coronary atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction.
“It is a measure of ineffectiveness,” said Zhanlin Chen, third year student in medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine of the Northwestern University and the main author of the new study; His co -authors included several doctors from the Faculty of Feinberg. “It looks like how bad your heart is,” he added. “You just will have to do a little bit of mathematics.”
Some experts said they saw wisdom in DHRP as metric. Dr. Peter Aziz, a pediatric cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic, said he seemed to be an advance on the information provided by daily steps or the only average heart rate.
“What is probably more important for Cardio Fitness is what your heart does for the amount of work it has to do,” he said. “It’s a reasonable way to measure this.”
Metric does not look at the heart rate during exercise. But, said Dr. Aziz, it has always provided a feeling of global efficiency which, above all, has been shown that researchers had an association with the disease.
The study size added validity to the results, said Dr. Aziz. Scientists have mapped the Fitbit data of nearly 7,000 users of intelligent watches against electronic medical records.
Mr. Chen said that a simple way to grasp the value of the new metric was to compare two hypothetical people. Both take 10,000 steps a day, but one has a heart rate at an average daily rest of 80 – in the middle of the healthy range – while the heart rate at the rest of the other is 120.
The first person would have a DHRP of 0.008, the second 0.012. The higher the ratio, the stronger the signaling of heart risk.
In the study, the 6,947 participants were divided into three groups according to their ratios; Those who have the highest showed a stronger association with the disease than other participants. The DHRPS metric was also better to reveal the risk of illness than steps or the only heart rate, the study revealed.
“We have designed this metric to be at low cost and use data that we are already collecting,” said Chen. “People who want to be in charge of their own health can do some mathematics to understand this.”