Many people use a smartwatch to monitor their cardiovascular health, often counting the number of steps that adopt the course of the day or by registering their medium daily heart rate. Now, the researchers offer an improved metric, which combines the two using the basic mathematics: divide the medium daily cardiac frequency for the average daily number of steps.
The resulting relationship – the daily cardiac frequency per phase, or DHRP – provides information on how efficient the heart works, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Feinberg School of Medicine of the Northwestern University and published today on the Journal of American Heart Association.
The study discovered that the people whose hearts work in a less efficient way, with this metric, were more prone to various diseases, including type II diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, stroke, coronary anterosclerosis and myocardial infarction.
“It is a measure of inefficiency,” said Zhanlin Chen, a third year medicine student at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University and the main author of the new study; His co -authors included several Faculty Doctors of Feinberg. “Look how much your heart is going badly,” he added. “You just have to do some mathematics.”
Some experts said they saw wisdom in the DHRPs like a metric. Dr. Peter Aziz, a pediatric cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said that it seemed to be an advance on the information provided by alone daily steps or medium heart rate.
“What is probably most important for Cardio Fitness is what your heart does for the amount of work you have to do,” he said. “This is a reasonable way to measure it.”
Metric does not observe heart rate during exercise. But, said dr. Aziz, however, provided a general sense of efficiency which, above all, has been shown that researchers have an association with the disease.
The size of the study added valid to the results, said dr. Aziz. Scientists mapped Fitbit data of almost 7000 smartwatch users against electronic medical folders.
Chen said that a simple way to grasp the value of the new metric was to compare two hypothetical individuals. Both take 10,000 steps per day, but one has a heart rate of daily resting 80 – in the middle of the healthy range – while the heart rate at daily rest is 120.
The first person would have a DHRP of 0.008, the second 0.012. The greater the relationship, the stronger the signaling of heart risk.
In the study, the 6,947 participants were divided into three groups based on their relationships; Those with the highest showed a stronger association with the disease than other participants. The DHRPS metric was even better in revealing the risk of illness compared to the counts of the steps or the heart rate alone, discovered the study.
“We designed this metric to be low cost and to use the data we are already collecting,” said Chen. “People who want to be responsible for their health can do some mathematics to understand it.”