Many people use a smartwatch to monitor their cardiovascular health, often measuring the number of steps that take the order of their day or recording their average daily heart rate. Now, the researchers suggest an enhanced measurement, which combines the two using basic mathematics: Divide your average daily heart rate with your daily average number of steps.
The resulting reason – the daily heart rate per step or DHRPS – provides information on how effectively the heart works, according to a study conducted by researchers at the FEINBERG School of Medical School at Northwestern University and published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The study found that people whose hearts work less effectively, with this measurement, were more prone to various diseases, including type II diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, stroke, coronary atherosclerosis.
“It is a measure of ineffectiveness,” said Zhanlin Chen, a third medical student at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and head of the new study. His colleagues included several Feinberg doctors. “He examines how bad your heart is doing,” he added. “You just need to make a small piece of mathematics.”
Some experts said they saw wisdom in DHRPS as a metric. Dr. Peter Aziz, a pediatric cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic, said he appeared to be a progress of information provided by daily steps or average heart rate.
“What is most likely more important to Cardio Fitness is what your heart is doing for the amount of work it should do,” he said. “This is a reasonable way to count this.”
The measurement does not examine the heart rate during exercise. But Dr. Aziz said, he gave yet another overall sense of effectiveness that, in particular, proved to be a relationship with the disease.
The size of the study added validity to the findings, said Dr. Aziz. Scientists have mapped FitBit data from about 7,000 Smartwatch users against electronic medical records.
Mr Chen said that a simple way to understand the value of the new measurement was to compare two hypothetical people. Both take 10,000 steps a day, but one has an average daily heart rate 80 – in the middle of the healthy range – while the daily heart rate of the other is 120.
The first person would have DHRPS 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 based on their proportions. Those with the highest showed a stronger relationship with illness than other participants. DHRPS measurement was also better in revealing the risk of disease than steps measurements or heart rate only, according to the study.
“We designed this measurement to be low -cost and use data we already collect,” Mr Chen said. “People who want to be responsible for their own health can do a little math to understand it.”
