With technological advancements happening in a fast pace in the recent years, you would not be baffled if a machine can actually predict your lifespan. Well, it might be happening just now. A group of cardiologists from John Hopkins University has apparently found a way to accurately predict your risk of dying over a 10-year period based solely on how well you were able to run on a treadmill.
Well, based from their analysis of data from 58,020 heart stress tests, the cardiologists have reported that they have developed a formula to help compute life expectancy.
They call it as a new algorithm, FIT Treadmill Score. Their findings were published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings on its March 2 issue.The results can be concluded to give clues about a person's health and they should be calculated for millions of people undergoing cardiac stress tests in the United States every year.
According to Haitham Ahmed, M.D. M.P.H., lead researcher and a cardiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, "The notion that being in good physical shape portends lower death risk is by no means new, but we wanted to quantify that risk precisely by age, gender and fitness level, and do so with an elegantly simple equation that requires no additional fancy testing beyond the standard stress test."
Age and gender were factors included in the computation. Aside from that, they also included the peak heart rate reached during exercise and the ability to tolerated physical activity.
"The FIT Treadmill Score is easy to calculate and costs nothing beyond the cost of the treadmill test itself. We hope the score will become a mainstay in cardiologists and primary clinicians' offices as a meaningful way to illustrate risk among those who undergo cardiac stress testing and propel people with poor results to become more physically active," explains senior study author Michael Blaha, M.D., M.P.H., director of clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease.
The American Heart Association defines exercise stress tests as a means for doctors to determine how your body can handle work or physical activity. The researchers noted that the new data yielded from the formula can show various degrees of fitness among individuals who have normal stress tests. These data show clues on their cardiac and respiratory fitness and can show overall death risk.
They were able to analyze data from 58,020 patients from ages 18 to 96 who underwent exercise stress tests from 1991 to 2009. They also traced the people who died from any cause in the 10-year period. The results show that those people of the same age and gender, the fitness level measured by METs and peak heart rate reached during physical activity were the greatest indicator of death risk.
For instance, as cited by Science Daily, a 45-year old woman with a fitness score in the bottom fifth percentile was estimated to have a 38 percent risk of dying over the next ten years, compared with two percent for a 45-year old woman with a top fitness score.