Knowing your long-term risk for heart attack and stroke is a simple fitness test away.

In two separate studies, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found that how fast a middle-age person can run a mile can help predict the risk of dying of heart attack or stroke decades later for men and could be an early indicator of cardiovascular disease for women.

Doctors have recently validated that middle-aged men’s risk of heart disease is closely tied to their fitness level. Their results were recently published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology For example, a 55-year-old man who needs 15 minutes to run a mile has a 30 percent 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 percent, according to the researchers. Researchers further 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.

The National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association funded the studies.

Posted By National Wellness Institute, Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Updated: Thursday, December 27, 2012